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THE 
MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 



THE 
MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

AND OTHER ACADEMIC 
PERFORMANCES 



BV 

BARRETT WENDELL 

Professor of English at Harvard College 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1909 






Copyright, 1909, by 
Charles Scribner's Sons 

Published October, 1909 



248488 



J 







CONTENTS 






I 


Page 




Of These Academic Performances . 


3 




II 






The Mystery of Education . . . 


9 




Ill 






The Study of Literature . . . 


81 




IV 






The Study of Expression .... 


137 




V 






Edgar Allan Poe . . ... 


197 




VI 






De Pr^eside Magnifico .... 


256 



OF THESE ACADEMIC PER- 
FORMANCES 



y 



OF THESE ACADEMIC PER- 
FORMANCES 

Since the beginning of this year 1909 
I have been called on no less than five 
times to speak before audiences gath- 
ered together on occasions of academic 
solemnity. Such performances are not 
quite cheerfully portentous either for 
us who take part in them or for those 
who are obliged to sit at our feet. 
Neither can quite avoid an underlying 
assumption that they will result in 
little more than fresh demonstrations 
of the hapless futility of sermons. Yet, 
after all, few circumstances can more 
clearly challenge one to do one's best. 
[ 3 ] 



ACADEMIC PERFORMANCES 

This thought has encouraged me to 
gather together the results of these 
occasional labours. They need little, 
if any, comment. All deal with mat- 
ters closely connected with American 
university life. All but one were fully 
written down, as well as I could write 
them, for the purpose of sure delivery. 
It has, therefore, seemed best to send 
them forth just as they were given; 
and, in finally writing the address which 
I had delivered from notes last year in 
Chicago, and repeated, in April, with 
various modifications, at Brown Uni- 
versity, to adhere, as nearly as I could, 
to its original form. The precise occa- 
sion for which each of these perform- 
ances was prepared is stated at the 
beginning of each. I need add only 
that the Phi Beta Kappa poem, given 
at Harvard College, is my first attempt 
to express myself publicly in verse ; and 
[ 4 ] 



ACADEMIC PERFORMANCES 

that I am consequently reminded of a 
rhyme uttered some years ago by a 
friend who found himself in a similar 
literary predicament: 

"Poeta nascitur, non fit — 
And that's the very deuce of it." 



[ 5 ] 



II 

THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 



An Address before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of 
Johns Hopkins University, 24 April, 1909 



II 

THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

Mr. President, and Members of 
THE Phi Beta Kappa Society: 

Of all the honours which can come 
to an American man of letters, none is 
more insidiously flattering than such 
an invitation as yours; for the sum 
and substance of a Phi Beta Kappa 
orator's message must always be the 
expression of his own opinion — a matter 
generally and relentlessly assumed of 
interest only to himself. Invited to 
give it to others, his first acknowledg- 
ment of the privilege must be the ex- 
pression of humble and hearty thanks 
to those whose goodness and loving- 
[ 9 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

kindness have afforded him the oppor- 
tunity. His next must l?e the perplex- 
ing inquiry of what range of opinion to 
set forth. Things in general offer an 
inconveniently extensive field of ob- 
servation. Some corner thereof, not too 
highly illuminated, must evidently be 
sought; and if that corner chance to 
be habitually a lurking-ground of his 
hearers, as well as of his own, so much 
the better for everybody. This line of 
exploration has brought me, without 
much hesitation, to a region familiar 
to us all. Your generous summons has 
called me from the eldest conservatory 
of education in our country to gladden, 
or sadden, a passing hour in the history 
of its most luxuriant seminary. I shall 
make no further apology for inviting 
your attention to some opinions of 
mine concerning the Mystery of Edu- 
cation. 

[ 10 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

For education, as we know it now- 
adays, is indisputably a mystery, in the 
full, baffling sense of that fascinatingly 
ambiguous word. It is the occupation, 
the trade if you will, the metier or mes- 
tier or ministerium, with which the 
waking lives of most of us are con- 
cerned; and, furthermore, there hovers 
about it, impalpable but certain, some 
such quivering atmosphere of filmy, 
phantasmagoric glamour as made un- 
earthly to profane eyes the vanished 
and impenetrable mysteries of primal 
Greece. 

What these were, one begins to 
wonder; and, if one be old enough 
to have experienced the obstacles to 
culture presented by despairingly 
thumbed pages of Liddell and Scott, 
one turns, if only from schoolboy habit, 
to see what they have to say about it. 
Mva-T'nptov is there, safe and sound; it 
[ 11 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

proves to mean nothing more nor less 
than mystery — the kind of thing im- 
memorially practised at Eleusis, and 
still perhaps vital to the being of those 
among our fellow-citizens who enjoy 
describing themselves by knightly titles, 
and walking about in fantastically uni- 
, formed processions. But the saving 
\ grace of Liddell and Scott is an absorb- 
\ ing passion for getting at the roots of 
; things, if they can. So a parenthesised 
reference leads us straight from MvarripLov 
to MvcTTT)^ — which fragment of musty 
lore turns out to signify one initiated. 
Even though still nowhere, we may 
feel, we are beginning to start on the 
road somewhere. A mystery clearly 
involves initiation; and initiation im- 
plies that, if the mystery is to persist, 
somebody — and, in all likelihood, al- 
most everybody — has got to be left 
out. Furthermore, to revert to Liddell 
[ 12 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

and Scott, the very existence of the 
substantive Mvarrj^ hangs on that of 
the verb Mveo) — to initiate; and this 
calls to mind the obvious truth that in 
order to initiate anybody into anything 
there must always be somebody else to 
perform the process of initiation. What 
manner of somebody this may be, Lid- 
deli and Scott finally proceed to inti- 
mate. Mueo) — to initiate — they derive 
from Mva>, where they leave us; and 
Mv(o they define *'to close, to shut; 
especially of the lips and eyes, to wink," 
Muo) seems elemental, at least so far 
as Liddell and Scott go; according to 
them, it is derived from nothing short 
of the heart of nature. Wherefore, 
perhaps, they freely permit themselves 
that beautifully imaginative pregnancy 
of definition. As one puts aside the 
exhausted volume, one can hardly help 
reflecting that if we keep our lips closed 
[ 13 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

and solemnly wink at one another, no- 
body else need ever know that we do 
not know all about it. 

Some of us do, perhaps; beyond 
question a good many of us talk as if 
they did, and write, and publish, until 
less confident heads begin to swim with 
the sad self-consciousness of compara- 
tive ignorance. Of a few facts we can 
happily feel sure. This Education — 
with a fine, big capital E — is doubly 
a mystery: it is not only a trade or 
occupation, but, as I pointed out a good 
many years ago, it is such an object of 
faith in these United States of Amer- 
ica, and perhaps everywhere else in 
this twentieth century of the Christian 
Era, that we may fairly regard it as a 
cult, almost as a religion. Those of us 
who, for better or worse, are called on, 
so far as may be in our power, to pre- 
serve and to guide it, are charged with 

[ 14 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

an oflSce almost priestly. Harvard is 
not only a conservatory nor Johns 
Hopkins only a seminary; both are 
sanctuaries. Membership of the Phi 
Beta Kappa consequently has its grave 
side as well as its happy; for it marks 
one special degree of initiation into a 
mystery held peculiarly reverend in our 
own time and country. 

So long as reverence preserves a 
mystery, initiates of any degree may 
rest content. In any venerable mys- 
tery, however — trade or cult — one great 
virtue has always been difficulty of 
access. Those who are not admitted 
to its secrets, never quite sure of what 
the secrets are, hold them in awful 
respect. Even though the secrets them- 
selves be trivial or outworn, too, the 
fact that whoever attains them must 
work vigilantly, and bear sharp scrutiny 
makes the mere attainment a token of 
[ 15 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

power; for the masters are thus cho- 
sen by a pitiless process of selection — a 
process favourable to the quality of man 
or beast. The moment the process 
of selection begins to relax, though, 
— ^the moment people begin to attain 
something which looks like initiation 
without arduous effort, vigorous con- 
centration, devoted self-sacrifice, — the 
great safeguard of any mystery begins 
to weaken ; the mystery itself, indeed, is 
threatened with dissipation. Now, to 
my mind, this reverend mystery of ours 
is not at present so secure from dissi- 
pation as we are disposed comfortably 
to assume. A good many facts, at 
least, generally supposed to be tokens 
of its enduring strength, may certainly 
be presented rather in the light of 
something like symptoms of disease. 

The unprecedented extension of pop- 
ular education at public expense, for ex- 
[ 16 ]: 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

ample, is magnificently generous. We 
are proud of our free schools, primary, 
secondary, and technical; of our free 
universities, and of our philanthropic 
schemes for bringing academic degrees 
by rural delivery to the doors of la- 
bourers, and their sons and their 
daughters. All the same, nobody can 
deny that this process does a good deal 
to make easy what used to be hard, and 
thus to impair its moral value. Again, 
something similar is true of our public 
library system. When to learn German 
in Massachusetts a subsequently emi- 
nent scholar had to import both his text 
and his dictionary, he knew that they 
were precious tools, with which he set to 
work heroically and successfully. Now- 
adays, when everybody can have such 
things for nothing, people seem gener- 
ally disposed to regard them only as 
tiresome playthings. Still again, when 
[ 17 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

school books had to be bought, the 
children who owned them — or at worst 
the parents of such children — were re- 
minded, if only by the demand on their 
pockets, that books are, or ought to be, 
objects of value. In these new times, 
when every public school throughout 
our country provides free text-books 
as well as free instruction, the pauperi- 
zation of learning has gone so far that 
you can hardly persuade well-to-do 
undergraduates at our older colleges to 
regard the expenditure of fifteen or 
twenty dollars a year for books they 
must study as anything else than an 
imposition on your part, impelling them 
on theirs to wasteful extravagance. 

Another and a different force at 
present tending to dissipate our mys- 
tery may perhaps give rise to more 
divergence of opinion; but whether 
you welcome it or deplore it, you can- 
[ 18 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

not neglect it. A century ago, educa- 
tion, generally confined to men, en- 
joyed the kind of respect which we 
have been accustomed, from eldest 
time, to associate with the conception 
of virility. At present the general 
practice of coeducation combines with 
the luxuriant growth of colleges, and 
the like, especially designed for women 
— who mature earlier than men, and 
consequently listen and recite some- 
what more acceptably than normal 
males under the age of twenty-five — to 
produce a latent suspicion that educa- 
tion, if not learning, may soon prove 
something like what a sceptical Italian 
once pronounced the Catholic Church 
to be — cosa eccellente per le donne. On 
this point, two observations occur to me;- 
according to divers authorities the pres- 
ence of many women in any given kind 
of classes — such as those in English 
[ 19 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

literature — ^generally drives men, for 
self-protection, into other fields of cul- 
ture; and one reason why may perhaps 
be shadowed in a somewhat frivolous 
comment on American manners lately 
made by an evidently unsympathetic 
observer — namely, that the regular fem- 
inine form of the word cad in the United 
States appears to be co-ed. 

That this pleasantry, whatever you 
may think of its taste, is comprehen- 
sive, nobody would pretend. It brings 
instantly to mind, in contradiction, an 
incident said to have occurred not long 
ago at an American public school for 
girls. A skilful and devoted woman 
there had long maintained in her 
classes a high standard of instruction, 
attested by unflinchingly definite marks 
or grades. The story runs that a new 
superintendent disapproved her meth- 
ods. If in a given class, for example, 
[ ^0 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

no pupil displayed anything higher 
than mediocrity, no grades of special 
commendation were returned. The 
superintendent directed her thereafter 
to give the best pupil in any class the 
highest mark allowed by the scale — 
one hundred per cent., let us say — and 
to grade the others according to this 
fortuitous standard. The process he is 
understood to have believed encourag- 
ing to the unfortunate or the stupid. 
The teacher declined to obey him, con- 
scientiously holding that a high grade 
ought to certify high scholarship. For 
this insubordination she was presently 
removed to a position of less dignity. 
In other words, she was severely dis- 
ciplined for an attempt to maintain a 
definite standard of attainment. As 
a natural consequence, the reports of 
her successor indicated a gratifying 
improvement in the quality of pupils at 
[ 21 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

the school in question, which made 
almost everybody happier; and, as the 
good woman with unpractical ideals 
happened to die within the year, no 
harm has ensued to anybody or any- 
thing except this reverend mystery of 
ours. The benevolent lowering of 
standard has perhaps done something 
toward a local dissipation of its gla- 
mour. 

Now whether such matters as these 
seem portentous of better days to come, 
or of worse, we can hardly deny that 
they concern us, so far as we are priests 
of the cult of education or initiates of 
its mystery. Very likely the mystery 
had grown too dense — some manner of 
dissipation may doubtless be good for 
it. We are bound to acknowledge, 
however, that a considerable process of 
dissipation is now going on, and there- 
fore that we cannot prudently rely 
[ -2 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

much longer on the old formulas and 
rituals. Taking things at their very 
best, we cannot much longer rest as- 
sured that those who penetrate to our 
secrets must do so by an arduously 
selective process, and that those who 
linger outside will justly feel the coura- 
geous dignity of whoever finally wins 
his right to place therein. We have not 
lost our basic faith; we are beginning 
to perceive, however, that if our faith is 
to be sustained, we must understand it, 
and exemplify it, and assert it otherwise 
than in the past. 

For one fact, I believe, we must can- 
didly admit. At this moment more 
thought is given to education, more 
effort devoted to it, more expense lav- 
ished on it — of time and of energy as 
well as of unstinted gift, public and 
private — than ever before. Yet there 
is room for doubt whether the practical 
[ 23 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

result of it has ever been much less 
palpable. There are moods, indeed, 
when some of us must fall to wondering 
whether educational processes were 
ever before so indefinite in purpose, or 
quite so ineffectual. 

This brings us to the question of 
what we mean by education. Without 
attempting precise definition, which 
might involve endless dispute, we may, 
perhaps, agree on two or three com- 
monplaces, sufficient for our purpose. 
Man, to begin with, whether you take 
the word to mean the individual or the 
species, has the misfortune to be con- 
scious. Sooner or later his conscious- 
ness makes him aware that, at least as 
he knows himself by any process as yet 
developed or devised, he is a thing 
surrounded by other things, or by 
something else. A convenient name 
for this inconvenient circumstance is 
[ 24 ]! 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

environment. Some of it, like his 
clothes, his friends and his enemies, is 
close at hand; some, like the Antarctic 
Pole, or the Moon, or the planets, or 
the stars, or space unfathomable and 
time without end, is vanishingly re- 
mote. There it is, however, every- 
where about him, perceived and un- 
perceived, inextricably intermingled, 
various, indefinite, infinite if you will, 
yet, so far as it surrounds man, a unit, 
in that it is not himself. 

Now that innocent little adverb not 
implies one aspect of man's environ- 
ment, from his point of view important. 
Whatever else not stirs in your mind, it 
cannot help reminding you of the un- 
comfortable fact that there is such a 
thing as contradiction. Environment, 
on the whole, contradicts man with a 
persistence sure at last to be fatal; for 
he generally suffers a good deal, and by 
[ 25 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

and by he dies. Meanwhile, as we have 
seen, he is conscious; and his con- 
sciousness manifests itself in thought, in 
speech, in work, in play, in behaviour. 
Thus he himself is part of the environ- 
ment of the generations which have 
kindled to consciousness and faded 
into ashes before him, and of those 
destined to do so when his own little 
flame has flickered out. He is a torch- 
bearer, if you like the pretty old meta- 
phor, carrying the gleam of life through 
the darkness of environment which 
must forever enshroud the instant con- 
centrated in his allotted term of years. 
The better he carries his torch, the less 
flickering the light thereof, the happier 
he, the happier those to come, and the 
more content we may fancy the van- 
ished fathers who have confided it to 
his passing care. Metaphor is perhaps 
leading us astray. Without its aid, 
[ 26 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

the while, we might hardly have under- 
stood so well as now what we mean by 
believing that man is at his best when 
best adjusted to his environment; and 
that the best means we know of helping 
him toward adjustment is our reverend 
mystery of education. 

All of which, together with its vague- 
ness, has a comfortable sound of pre- 
cision. If we are at all right, the problem 
of education begins to look refreshingly 
simple. Ascertain what environment 
is, and what man is. State the conse- 
quent formula of adjustment in approxi- 
mate terms ; — we all admit that ultimate 
exactitude is beyond human power, but 
that we can practically get along with- 
out it. And there we are. We can hand 
over the formula to those who, even if 
slow to discover it, can probably use it as 
well as we. Thereupon we may devote 
our own energies to higher things. 
[ 27 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

When we begin to scrutinise environ- 
ment, however, it turns out to be dis- 
concertingly ekisive. Take it scien- 
tifically, if you will: astronomy reveals 
to us a universe where everything is 
on the way from somewhere to some- 
where else; so does geology; so does 
biology; so do history, and economics, 
and sociology, and physics, and chem- 
istry. The fact is certain; the process 
is observable everywhere, in various 
phases, some of them unpleasantly ex- 
plosive. These occasional explosions, 
particularly when they take place in 
the immediate neighbourhood of man, 
excite alert desire to know what they 
mean. In certain details, such as the 
arrangement of electric wires in the 
turrets of war ships, we can find out, 
and do something to mend matters; 
but generally we can only recognise 
things which blow us up as manifes- 
[ 28 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

tations of a fact which, for want of a 
better term, we are apt nowadays to 
describe as force. Nobody knows what 
it is; nobody knows why it exists; no- 
body knows whence it comes, or whither 
it goes ; yet nobody can help admitting, 
the while, that every atom of human 
environment embodies it, more or less 
active or latent. In a single word, we 
can find no better definition of environ- 
ment than by declaring it to be force. 
Which may not seem to help us much 
until we remind ourselves that thereby 
we assert it to be something never fixed, 
never at rest, always instinct with the 
protean movement of life. 

Of all the manifestations of force 
which consciously affect man, none are 
more instantly palpable than such as 
involve his control over the animate, 
and still more the inanimate, condi- 
tions of nature. When he learned to 
[ 29 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

tame domestic animals, for example, 
his relation to environment manifestly 
changed ; so, still more, it was changed 
by his discovery that he could subject 
to his use what he so long deluded 
himself by supposing to be the element 
of fire. The very terms by which we 
still describe remote ages of social de- 
velopment — the Age of Stone, the Age 
of Bronze, and so on — remind us of the 
old changes of environing force which 
demanded new adjustments to meet 
their unprecedented conditions. 

By the time when man began to re- 
cord himself, he was approaching what 
we call civilization, of which, in ulti- 
mate simplicity, the chief conditions 
seem to have been mastery of fire, of 
metal, of wheels, and of sails. The 
Egyptians had these, and the Homeric 
heroes ; the Romans had little else ; and 
until the Nineteenth Century there was 
[ 30 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

not much else anywhere, except gun- 
powder and printing presses. Even 
under these fairly simple conditions, 
adjustment to environment was no 
child's play. Study thereof, and of its 
various misadventures, remains the 
chief occupation of traditional scholar- 
ship everywhere. In consequence, I 
remember few more pregnant hours 
than I passed, some dozen years ago, 
at the feet of a Harvard Phi Beta 
Kappa orator who pointed out that the 
Nineteenth Century — with its final mas- 
tery of steam and electricity — was really 
the beginning of a new ethnological 
epoch, as different from any of the 
earlier periods as that of metals was 
from that of chipped flints. The fact 
seems to me undeniable. Environment 
is now pressing on us under new condi- 
tions and at an unprecedented rate. 
It would have been comfortable to fol- 
[ 31 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

low the Harvard orator not only in his 
assertions but in his conclusions. Some 
of his hearers, however, seemed indis- 
posed to agree without reserve that 
everything would always be all right if 
everybody should devote all his energy 
to the science or the art of engineering. 
Environment nowadays — and, so far 
as any one now on earth is concerned, 
henceforth — ^proves to be not only force, 
but force in all the complexity of un- 
precedented epochal conditions, which 
nobody can pretend to understand. 
The only certain fact about it, at least 
to my thinking, is that on which I 
touched a moment ago. Throughout 
our lifetimes the rate at which it has 
moved has been swiftly accelerating. 
Think of anything you like as it was 
in the year 1900; or, better still, turn 
to what you wrote about any condi- 
tions surrounding you ten years ago. 
[ 32 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

You may count yourself a prophet if 
you find your experience much other 
than that of a friend of mine who 
lately read over some observations on 
contemporary England set down, to 
the best of his ability, in the last year 
of the Nineteenth Century. He found 
hardly a word to alter, he said; only, 
with old-age pensions grinning in his 
face, and Mr. Lloyd- George's Budget 
voted to meet them, the essay im- 
pressed him as a document from times 
as remote as those of the Tudors or 
the Plantagenets. Ten years hence, one 
may venture to guess, the conditions 
of to-day may well seem prehistoric. 
It is to nothing less than this environ- 
ment of indefinitely accelerating force 
that modern education attempts to ad- 
just man. 

This first term of our problem thus 
proves rather less manageable than it 
[ 33 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

sounded. Contenting ourselves, how- 
ever, with humble recognition that 
environment is accelerating force, we 
may now go on to consider what man 
is, whom we have got somehow to try 
to adjust to it. He is conscious, beyond 
question; and he has paid himself the 
compliment of describing his con- 
sciousness by the somewhat hyperbolic 
name of intelligence. We may grant, 
indeed, that whether he can really 
understand anything or not, he will 
always suppose that he can. Intelli- 
gent, therefore, we will call him for our 
momentary purpose of definition. Even 
more clearly, he is at once the product 
of certain natural forces — such as an- 
cestors and history — and himself a 
source of similar natural forces, more 
or less destined to affect other people. 
He can beget children, preach sermons, 
make works of art, or trouble, or 
[ 34 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

mistakes. In other words, he can 
somehow accumulate force from his 
environment, and somehow radiate it 
thereto. For our purposes, I believe, 
we may best accordingly consider him 
as an intelligent focus of force. 

That metaphorical definition has the 
baffling fault of immateriality ; unless I 
am quite mistaken, a focus is only a 
point, with neither length, breadth, nor 
thickness to disturb its ethereal purity. 
To think any further, we need some- 
thing a little more substantial. We may 
liken man, therefore, not to a focus pure 
and simple, but to the focal instrument 
most familiar to our everyday habits of 
mind — namely, a lens, such as gathers, 
and concentrates or disperses, rays of 
light. His relation to the force which 
he collects and radiates is something 
like that of an object-glass or of a 
burning-glass to the phase of force 
[ 35 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

which we now figure to ourselves in 
the guise of light- waves or heat-waves. 
The most important error in our simile 
is that man, as we conceive him, differs 
from a piece of glass or crystal in the 
matter of intelligence. However erro- 
neous our notion may be proved by the 
sympathetically accelerated intelligence 
of times to come, we cannot yet habit- 
ually imagine the lens of commerce as 
flexibly and consciously sensitive, or as 
ever troubled with desire to know what 
it is about. Man, considered as a focal 
lens of force, on the other hand, is so 
troubled all the time, inevitably and 
rightly. Rightly, I say, because we 
shall hardly disagree that if his intelli- 
gence languish, he will neither gather 
nor radiate force with any but accidental 
effect, and yet that if his intelligence 
grow excessive it will somehow cloud or 
paralyze his focal powers. He has 
[ 36 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

never yet been at his ideal best ; doubt- 
less — to use a favourite phrase of old 
Increase Mather — he never will be until 
the second coming of Our Lord. He is 
nearest his ideal best when his intelli- 
gence and his focal powers, cumulative 
and radiatory alike, are most nearly 
balanced. 

To illustrate what I have in mind, 
we may perhaps turn to a few examples 
of it. Somewhere in the work of John 
Stuart Mill, if I remember rightly, he 
points out the indisputable truth that, 
so far as man is concerned with material 
things, human activity may be reduced 
to the power of taking something from 
somewhere and putting it somewhere 
else. If, with this principle in mind, we 
turn our attention to a fine art, such 
as cookery or architecture, we shall 
soon come to agree that the best artists 
— the best cooks or the best architects 
[ 37 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

— are those who best know what to 
take and where to put it, and who are 
not troubled by hesitant indecision in 
the process. Eggs or spices, stone 
or wood or metal, lie ready at hand ; so 
do fire and machines, ovens and en- 
gines and derricks. ^Eons of experi- 
ment have proved what can be done 
with them. Here are a few of the 
countless rays of force ready for con- 
centration in the little human focus 
prepared to gather them. Let him 
use intelligence enough to gather them 
selectively, and half his work is done; 
if, meanwhile, his intelligence has 
served him to gather among them rays 
which the next man would have neg- 
lected, his half-done work is done in 
the manner sometimes called original 
and sometimes great. 

If he is really to achieve anything, the 
while, let alone originality or greatness, 
[ 38 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

the other half of his focal task must be 
performed as well; he must put these 
ingredients or materials, which he has 
taken from somewhere, in the precise 
somewhere else where his intelligence 
leads him to suppose that they most 
happily belong. He must concentrate 
or radiate them into his own sauce, 
or his own cathedral. If he do this 
right, he has made them a new centre 
of force — bodily or spiritual, or both. 
Others than he will eat and give thanks, 
or kneel in adoration, and otherwise do 
their own focal work the better for his. 
If he do his work amiss, however, the 
sauce will be unsavory, the cathedral 
unstable or ugly, both useless, or at 
best short of the usefulness which 
might have been theirs. In such re- 
grettable event, when you come to con- 
sider why things have gone wrong, you 
will generally find that it is either be- 
[ 39 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

cause he has gathered his material stu- 
pidly, or has used it stupidly, or has 
stopped to think how not to be stupid 
until he has unwittingly become more 
impotent than if he had not stopped to 
think at all. In other words, his intelli- 
gence and his focal powers have got out 
of balance. 

Or take a more subtle instance, or at 
least a more complicated. Man, we all 
know, is a political animal; and now- 
adays he is hereabouts rather disquiet- 
ingly active in this aspect. A good deal 
of our public conduct must turn on 
majority votes, cast for immensely va- 
rious reasons, of self-interest, of patri- 
otic or moral principle, of prejudice or 
invincible ignorance, or carelessness or 
of what presents itself to the voters in 
the light of intelligence. As American 
citizens, men — alone or collected — are 
tremendously focal centres of force. 
[ 40 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

On what they think, or on what they 
think that they think, about sundry 
matters must depend what they do, or 
at least what they try to do, about them. 
On what they really do, purposely or 
not, must considerably depend our na- 
tional welfare. 

At this moment, for example, certain 
general questions are in the air. With- 
out venturing even to suggest answers, 
I shall ask you to agree that we shall 
hardly waste the little time demanded 
for reminding ourselves of the kind of 
political force at present environing us. 
Every one admits nowadays, as a gen- 
eral principle, that special privilege is 
objectionable; yet protected industries 
are honestly demanding what seems 
like special privilege to many of our 
citizens; and, with equal honesty, 
labour unions are demanding what 
seems equally like it to some others. 
[ 41 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

Again, a generally admitted principle 
asserts that direct taxation should fall 
proportionately on everybody, so that 
everybody may be aware of just what 
degree of legal imposition he is called 
on to bear. If there be an exception to 
this principle, it is that those who im- 
pose a direct tax should be willing to 
bear at least their full share of it; oth- 
erwise you have what has generally 
been called confiscation, to greater or 
less degree. Yet not only popular 
prejudice but the utterances of emi- 
nent statesmen and of far from radical 
newspapers are vigorously informing 
us that a graduated tax on inheritances 
and incomes — a tax which completely 
spares the majority, who are poor, and 
despoils the minority, who are rich — 
is obviously correct in principle. 

Still again, and putting aside the 
predatory forces thus called to mind, 
[ 42 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

there is room for great difference of 
opinion concerning the proper function 
of legislation. To some it appears clear 
that no legislative act can be healthy, 
and probably that none can really be 
operative, which contradicts custom; 
equally respectable thinkers believe 
heart and soul in imposing righteous- 
ness on humanity by legislation. It is 
said that an American legislature once 
placed the Ten Commandments on a 
Statute Book by a considerable major- 
ity. It is certain that prohibitory legis- 
lation, theoretically contrary to the 
rights of the individual, and practically 
neglectful of the regular conduct of 
civilized mankind, commands wide ap- 
proval, even if mitigated by narrow 
sympathy. The function of our courts 
is equally unsettled in the public mind. 
Some highly desirable citizens hold 
that the business of judges is to de- 
[ 43 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

fine and to maintain the law; others, 
of stainless patriotism, urge that if the 
law chance to be unpopular, or other- 
wise unacceptable, a judge who should 
maintain it probably deserves impeach- 
ment, and certainly ought to be defeat- 
ed in case he hold his seat by popular 
vote and present himself for re-election. 
How these questions, and the number- 
less more which they may suggest, 
should be answered, we need not 
dispute. We shall agree, I hope, that 
man can answer them best when he 
can best perceive on the one hand 
what they mean, and on the other 
what consequences his answer will in- 
volve. In other words, political man, like 
man the artist — cook or architect — is at 
his best when his intelligence and his 
focal powers are most nearly balanced. 
Now such balance is evidence of the 
nearest possible adjustment of man to 
[ 44 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

his environment— of our focal lens of 
force to the force amid which it lives out 
its little span of life; and to help tow- 
ard some such adjustment is one chief 
function, as we have already seen, of 
this perplexing mystery of ours — the 
mystery of education, which we pro- 
fess, and cherish, and revere. So far as 
we profess it, we must begin to feel, our 
work in this world has an aspect full of 
stimulus both imaginative and moral, 
which a good many of us — focally 
blind, if you will — are accustomed now- 
adays to neglect or to ignore. It can- 
not help aflfecting man — artist, political 
animal, and countless things else. It 
cannot help either stimulating or im- 
pairing his power of adjustment to his 
environment. We sometimes speak of 
the humanities as if they were a sepa- 
rate and almost negligible part of such 
work as is ours in this world. Techni- 
[ 45 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

cally, I will cheerfully grant you, they 
are; but only because we have con- 
fined the name to limits far more nar- 
row than its meaning. Plays with 
words may obscure truth or conceal it; 
they can never avert it. Whether we 
will or not, the true office of education, 
from beginning to end, is irresistibly, 
tremendously, magnificently human. 

When I touched on this point a little 
while ago, you may remember, I men- 
tioned an opinion here and there held 
by serious observers to the effect that 
educational processes are, neverthe- 
less, at this moment remarkably in- 
definite in purpose and ineffectual in 
result. If there be reason for this — 
and I fear that few of us can feel com- 
placently certain of the contrary — it 
should seem sadly to follow that we who 
are engaged in the conduct of education 
nowadays leave something to be de- 

[ 46 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

sired in point of professional efficiency. 
Take, for example, the condition in 
which we find the study of languages, 
ancient and modern — Greek or Latin, 
French or German or English. A stu- 
dent who can currently read a foreign 
language, after a good many years of 
nominal devotion to it at school and at 
college, is as remarkable as a black swan 
or a white crow ; a student who emerges 
from a course of earnest instruction in 
English composition with perceptibly, 
or at least with incontestably, firmer 
command of his pen for general pur- 
poses than he had to begin with, has 
hardly yet had the benevolence to cross 
my path. Something analogous is true 
of work in literature, in history, in 
philosophy; it seems more or less true 
wherever my observation has extended. 
The most comforting comment on it 
takes the form of assurance that, inas- 
[ 47 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

much as ideals would no longer be 
ideals if they were attainable, an ideal- 
ist so fatuous as to look for anything 
like ideal results is doomed to disap- 
pointment. 

Refreshed by this, one is presently 
confronted with another fact, less de- 
batable. It is from these very students 
that our own colleges, other colleges, 
schools everywhere, the country in gen- 
eral yearly select the teachers charged 
with the task of instructing younger 
human beings in subjects so far from 
mastered by themselves. If the conse- 
quent predicament were local, all we 
should need anywhere would be to 
ascertain where what we try to do is 
done better than we do it, and to cor- 
rect our errors accordingly. So far as 
I am aware, however, search for such 
light has hardly led us beyond regions 
of darkness indistinguishable from our 
[ 48 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

own; this seems as extensive as the 
North American Continent, if not, in- 
deed, as the modern world. One sadly 
recalls the story of the student who 
made pilgrimage to a celebrated insti- 
tution of learning, for the purpose of 
sitting at somebody's feet, and com- 
plained that, alas, he could find no feet 
to sit at. Humble in spirit though we 
may be, it is not granted us to perceive 
others demonstrably much better than 
ourselves. So there we are. We all do 
our best; we all know that those who 
study under us may be trusted to do 
theirs, at least when charged with re- 
sponsibility. The trouble is not moral. 
Yet we ourselves, on the whole, teach 
ill; and those whom we teach, ill- 
taught, teach in turn rather more ill 
still ; and those whom they have taught 
surge up to us year by year, to be 
taught on, less and less ready to under- 
[ 49 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

stand what little teaching we have 
begun to learn how to give them. 

There is trouble here, at first baf- 
fling. As f ocusses of force, we all begin 
to seem despairingly out of adjustment. 
Unless our line of reasoning has been 
all wrong, however, we may presently 
conclude that when any of us is out of 
adjustment it must be for one of three 
reasons: either intelligence, or cumu- 
lative power, or radiatory power is dis- 
proportionate — excessive or defective, 
as the case may be. The immediately 
consequent consideration to which I 
shall invite your attention may, perhaps, 
have its allurements ; for it is evidently 
an intelligent though cursory scrutiny 
of a matter dear to us all — namely, the 
condition of our own intelligence, so 
far as we are teachers or scholars. 

One thing seems instantly clear. 
At this moment our intelligence is 
[ 50 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

alive and wide-awake. Yet a very 
little retrospect will probably convince 
us that it has waked up pretty lately. 
In old times, as the times of our youth 
have acceleratingly become, the pur- 
pose of teaching was chiefly discipli- 
nary, and the method authoritative. I 
remember, for example, the anecdote of 
a schoolmaster in an old New England 
seaport, who was trying to teach a stub- 
born boy the elements of navigation. 
He made some statement about loga- 
rithms, and the boy inquired how he 
knew it was so. The teacher pulled a 
knife out of his pocket: "What's that ?" 
he asked. — "A pen-knife," said the 
boy. — "How do you know.^" asked the 
teacher. — "I don't know how I know," 
answered the boy, "but I know I 
know." — "Very well," said the teacher, 
"that is the way I know logarithms"; 
and thereupon he proceeded with the 

[ 51 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

lesson — this part of which the boy 
never forgot. The principles and meth- 
ods thus exemplified had one great 
merit: they remarkably developed and 
strengthened in pupils the power of 
concentrating attention, by sheer force 
of will, on uninteresting matters. Apart 
from this, they had no obvious effect 
on what intelligence the pupils may 
have possessed. We have bravely 
changed all that. One reason why our 
intelligence is so wide-awake nowadays 
may perhaps be found in the fact that 
the intelligence of our predecessors was 
almost asleep. So long as force is force 
and life is life, the story of both will be 
one of action and reaction. 

Now our scientific friends, I believe, 
tell us that reaction and action are 
ultimately equal. Those of us who 
are not initiated into the mysteries of 
science are accordingly driven toward 
[ 52 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

the conclusion that if the one gets us 
nowhere, the other will get us nowhere 
else. Matters might be worse. The 
old teaching had its merits, after all; 
though it was not very intelligent, and 
though its focal selection of force was 
extremely limited, it managed to radi- 
ate with considerable exactitude and 
with some approach to intensity. It 
did not know what it was about; but 
it came fairly near accomplishing its 
blind and traditional purpose. The 
chief trouble lay in the fact that blind 
tradition can hardly lead to such va- 
riation as is nowadays adored under 
the name of progress. When intelli- 
gence began to wake up, the air seemed 
thrilling with promise. We would ask 
ourselves what we were about ; we 
would get rid of outworn obstacles ; we 
would direct all our energies straight to 
the point, as soon as the point was 
[ 53 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

found; and such beings as should re- 
sult from these millennial new adjust- 
ments would evince the infinite perfec- 
tibility of human nature. So we went 
to work, and so we are at work still. 
We know what we are about far more 
nearly than people knew a century ago. 
We have got rid of many obstacles 
without always making sure that they 
were needless; we have attempted, for 
example, to cure the reluctance of pu- 
pils by allowing them — from kinder- 
garten to elective courses at college — 
the luxury of the slightest possible 
strain on unwilling attention. Yet we 
have not incontestably improved the 
pupils, nor yet so certainly ascertained 
just where to direct our energies as to 
direct them anywhere with quite the in- 
tensity of our rule-of-thumb predeces- 
sors. Earth, in fact, is no nearer 
heaven than it used to be. At times, 
[ 54 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

indeed, some of us, still resolved to 
get there or to know the reason why, 
grow sensible of doubt whether the 
time is not at hand when we may- 
best sit down, with good cigars, and 
think out the reason why. 

Thus ruminating, we should prob- 
ably come to the conclusion that one 
reason why is that we have been trying 
too hard to understand what we are 
about. We all know the sermons 
which have been preached from the 
text of Hamlet. We all know, as well, 
that academies have never yet pro- 
duced great works of art; and some of 
our friends assure us that what we 
cherish as our intelligence shrinks to 
nothing beside that of certain Oriental 
sages devoted to life-long contempla- 
tion of their own navels. One might 
go on, world without end. The sum 
and substance of it all would be that 
r 55 1 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

some inkling of why the teachers of 
to-day are ineflficient, or, in other words, 
ill-adjusted to their environment, may 
perhaps be found in a reactionary 
awakening of intelligence to a degree 
where it begins to be inhibitory. 

Now our previous considerations 
should assure us at this point of some- 
thing comfortably near a fact. So far as 
intelligence can be inhibitory in its effect 
on man, as a focus of force — and there- 
fore so far as it can interfere with him as 
an agent or a subject of education — it 
must do so by interfering either with his 
focal power of gathering force or with 
his equally focal power of radiating it. 

Our question thus becomes more 
definite; and the moment we inquire, 
in the first place, if, how, and when in- 
telligence has come to meddle with the 
cumulative powers of our little human 
lenses, we can begin to discern an 
[ 56 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

obvious answer. In the good old 
times, we have agreed, intelligence was 
torpid. Awakened, and directed tow- 
ard the state of education at the period 
of its awakening, its honest conviction, 
quite warranted by the momentary 
facts, was that education had become 
stupidly conventional. People learned 
things by heart, all the way from the 
alphabet to geometry and the Odes of 
Horace; what they had thus learned 
they repeated to others who tried to 
learn from them; they were getting to 
resemble Mohammedan scholars, re- 
quired to commit to memory the Koran 
and all the orthodox glosses on the 
sacred text, and supposed to need no 
more knowledge this side of Paradise. 
The consequent counsel of intelligence 
was that you should try to understand 
what you know before you proceed to 
do anything else with it. 
[ 57 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

This reaction we may agree to have 
been healthy, Kke the awakening of 
intelHgence which stimulated it. Very 
clearly, there was chance for improve- 
ment. We must set ourselves to work 
selectively. We must not rest content 
with accepting and imparting knowl- 
edge; we must scrutinise it, and ac- 
quire it. We must test what comes to 
us, proving all things, and holding fast 
only to that which is good. Torpidity 
had lulled our cumulative powers till 
they were starving for want of use. 
Here was the place where healthy reac- 
tion would surely bring about a new 
adjustment, better for the whole uni- 
verse. 

That the reaction has done a great 
deal of good I should be the last to 
deny. We can hardly imagine nowa- 
days what vast fields of inquiry, fa- 
miliar and remote, still lay fallow a 
[ 58 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

generation or two ago. A generation 
or two ago hardly any one could have 
imagined how few to-day would re- 
main unbroken by plough or even 
harrow. The harvests garnered in 
libraries all over the world are rich 
beyond the dreams of scholars whom 
you and I can remember; and these 
treasures, in their crude form gener- 
ally to be described as theses, are true 
treasures, in that they imply something 
more than hard and conscientious 
work; they could never have been 
wrested from their hidden lairs without 
the inspiration of devoted enthusiasm. 
It has all been worth while. So we 
press on still, competitively eager to 
gather and to garner more and more. 
But some of us, the Lord knows why, 
are beginning to wonder whether, on 
the whole, we have not gone rather too 
far. No one could pretend that intelli- 
[ 59 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

gence has here proved inhibitory to 
education by any process of repression. 
If it be true, however, that intelligence 
is inhibitory at all, here is a point 
where the trouble may perhaps partly 
lie, by reason of an over-development 
as fatal to balance as atrophy itself. 

We have strayed long enough in the 
misty regions of metaphor. It is time 
to consider just what we mean. Noth- 
ing can remind us more distinctly than 
the subjects of theses to which candi- 
dates for the degree of doctor of philos- 
ophy, or the like, have consecrated 
months and years of earnest work. 
Here are two or three. I remember at 
Harvard, not many years ago, one in 
Latin, certified as creditable by such 
of my colleagues as can currently read 
that learned language, on the methods 
of hair-dressing practised in imperial 
Rome. I have been informed, by the 
[ 60 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

way, if I remember rightly, that the 
scholar who wrote it was not excep- 
tional for personal tidiness. I remem- 
ber another entitled "De ea quae 
dicitur attractione in enuntiationihus reU 
ativis apud scriptores Grcecos'' — which 
means, I believe, ''Concerning what is 
called attraction in relative constructions 
used by Greek authors.'' A third con- 
cerned the tenure of land in the domin- 
ions of Brandenburg under the sover- 
eignty of the Great Elector; the writer 
of this is said by one of his examiners 
to have displayed boundless ignorance 
of shipping laws and tariffs in English- 
speaking regions ; but he was so unique 
an authority on Brandenburg real 
estate that he was declared proficient 
in economic history. 

Any one familiar with modern 
American universities must have plenty 
of similar memories. Pretty lately, for 

[ 61 1 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

example, my attention as a student 
of literature in America has been 
called to a printed thesis which pro- 
fessed to make some contribution to 
the literary history of Colonial Penn- 
sylvania, and to another about the 
"Heralds of American Literature." 
The latter dealt with works written in 
America between the Revolution and 
the year 1800. This stagnant period 
had already been exhaustively treat- 
ed by the late Professor Tyler; he had 
omitted, however, to emphasize the 
important truth that certain letters of 
Joel Barlow, or some such forgotten 
worthy, are preserved in the Public 
Library of Southport, Connecticut. 

To turn to foreign fields, there is no 
degree anywhere more worthily sus- 
tained than that of Doctor of Letters, 
at the University of Paris. Among the 
theses presented there by candidates in 
[ 62 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

Modern Literature a generation ago 
was the admirable work of the late 
Professor Beljame on "The Public and 
Men of Letters in England during the 
Eighteenth Century." Whoever has 
had the pleasure of reading it must 
have recognised its permanent value in 
defining how English literature passed 
from the stage of dependence on pa- 
tronage to that of self-support, derived 
from willing readers who stood ready 
to purchase. The book throws new 
floods of light into the toiling garrets of 
Grub Street. The very fact, however, 
that a briUiant French student should 
have turned his attention to so limited 
a field of English literature implies 
that the field of French literature was 
approaching exhaustion. The sub- 
jects of some later theses produced in 
France imply the same fact there con- 
cerning the literary history of England. 
[ 63 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

Here are a few of them: **The Youth 
of Wordsworth," "Robert Burns," 
"George Crabbe," "John Thelwall," 
"Edgar Allan Poe," "Nathaniel Haw- 
thorne," "Ralph Waldo Emerson," 
"Oliver Wendell Holmes," and "Will- 
iam James." I have reason to believe, 
indeed, that a serious French candidate 
has lately considered a project of pre- 
senting for the Doctorate of Letters at 
the Sorbonne a punctilious study of the 
work of Mr. William Dean Howells. 

By this time the conclusion toward 
which our course of specification has 
tended must loom clear. The healthy 
reactionary impulse of intelligence tow- 
ard investigation has got to a point 
where a rapidly increasing amount of 
investigating energy must be devoted 
to inquiring what there is left to inves- 
tigate. One can imagine, indeed, an 
approaching future when the mere dis- 

[ 64 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

covery of some uninvestigated corner of 
any field of study imaginable shall be 
hailed with tumultuous learned ova- 
tion all over the world as abundant and 
overflowing evidence of such power as 
should command the highest possible 
degree, from the most rigorous of aca- 
demic tribunals. When this rapturous 
vision begins to fade into the light of 
common day, any of us who may have 
yielded ourselves to its allurements 
must awaken to its chief meaning for 
us here and now. If we momentarily 
agree to consider your teacher or your 
scholar as if he were a man, and 
therefore an intelligent focus of force, 
and if we admit that he is at present 
inefficient for want of adjustment to 
his environment, we can hardly avoid 
perceiving that one reason why may be 
found in an inhibitory excess of intel- 
ligence which has resulted in over-stim- 
[ 65 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

ulated exhaustion of his focal power of 
accumulation. 

To put the case more simply, we are 
all at our best — ^men or teachers or 
scholars — when we know, with the 
least hesitation, what we possess, and 
what we want, and what to do with 
both. If we devote ourselves too stren- 
uously to hunting for what we want, 
we run the risk of forgetting what we 
have, of not knowing why we want 
what we want, and of losing all con- 
ception of what on earth we shall do 
with anything, whether already in our 
possession or by and by to be got there 
from somewhere else. That string of 
words has a thread of meaning, to hold 
it together; and nothing short of what 
sounds preposterous could have brought 
us without shock to a recent incident in 
my professional life. Preposterous or 
not, it will serve our next and almost 

[ 66 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

our last purpose; this is evidently to 
consider what sort of radiance we 
teachers nowadays diffuse among the 
students at our feet. 

In one of my classes there was a 
youth of deserving aspect, who did 
me the honour to follow my lectures 
attentively. So I felt duly grateful; 
and when he asked whether he might 
consult me about his plans in life, I 
was more than glad to put my wis- 
dom at his service. Within a few 
weeks, it presently transpired, he had 
come for the first time into posses- 
sion of an encyclopaedia. The joys of 
ownership had impelled him to plunge 
deep into the volumes. He had there- 
upon perceived, with genial precision, 
one thing which was the matter with 
learning, as previously imparted to 
him. It had been presented only in 
fragments ; as he put the case, every- 
[ 67 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

thing had been awfully specialised. 
That his encyclopaedia was composed 
by specialists he cheerfully conceded; 
that its contents were even more frag- 
mentary than his college courses he was 
equally ready to admit. He urged, 
however, that there was a good deal 
more in the encyclopaedia than the 
best specialist of them all could ever 
pretend to know. This granted, he 
went on, with divinely synthetic im- 
pulse, to opine that, if you could put 
this material completely together, you 
would know everything. Within the 
present limits of human knowledge, 
I agreed, some such statement of ideal 
omniscience might be accepted. Then 
came his memorably explosive burst of 
imagination. Like all good men, he 
was humble in spirit, yet desirous of 
doing good. The good he most wished 
to do was to preserve others from the 

[ 68 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

intoxicating enticements of specialisa- 
tion. Could he do this better, he asked, 
than by consecrating his life to the 
task of instruction at some fresh-water 
college, where, with the sole aid of his 
encyclopaedia, he might hope in due 
time to become the titular "Professor 
of Everything"? 

Comment on this incident seems 
needless. I have tried to recount it 
literally, nothing extenuating nor aught 
setting down in malice. It left me cer- 
tainly a sadder man, and perhaps a 
wiser. That boy, no doubt, talked like 
a fool; but, when he went away, there 
seemed to me something else than folly 
in the memory of him. He had dimly 
perceived, and in his own stammering 
way he had fearlessly tried to express, 
a truth pregnant for you and me. For 
if you and I, as teachers or scholars, 
as priests or initiates of the mystery of 

[ 69 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

education, threatened on all sides by 
unmeaningly impious dissipation of our 
mystery, and bewildered by the accel- 
erating rush of environment all about 
us, are to give due account of ourselves 
to the future, we must bestir ourselves 
to be dynamic. 

To be dynamic as teachers, and thus, 
so far as we can, to make dynamic in 
turn those who come within our influ- 
ence, is the earthly duty of our profes- 
sion. Again, you may well feel, I am 
losing myself in fine, big words. Even 
so, there is comfort for us all looming 
in sight. These vagaries have already 
strayed so long that they cannot stray 
much longer. They may leave us no- 
where, to be sure; if they do, they will 
have done at worst only what educa- 
tion now does to most of its patients; 
and few of us yet are ready to declare 
in consequence that education is not 
[ 70 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

worth while. Indeed, I remember few 
more inspiring eulogies than that 
which a professor of my acquaintance 
once privately pronounced on a newly 
departed colleague. The career just 
gently closed, he declared, had been 
among the most memorably useful in 
the whole history of the field of learn- 
ing which it had striven to cultivate. 
By faithful adherence to wrong meth- 
ods, in pursuit of wrong ends, it had 
conclusively demonstrated what ought 
not to be done. Next to triumphant 
success, my friend declared, this is, 
perhaps, the highest achievement with- 
in the range of human endeavour. All 
the same, most of us are ambitious 
enough to cling to the last infirmity 
of noble minds, and not to rest con- 
tent with the prospect of a useful- 
ness based on the fact that we shall 
unintentionally have been useless. So 
[ 71 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

far as we desire to know what we shall 
do to be saved, accordingly, we must 
still inquire, though never so hastily, 
what we mean by dynamic, as we have 
just used that impressive word. 

Intelligent, living lenses, we have 
agreed to imagine ourselves, focally col- 
lecting and radiating certain streams 
of the constantly accelerating force 
which surges about us, no one knows 
whence or whither; and our function, 
so far as we are teachers, and priests or 
initiates of the mystery of education, 
is to mould other lenses at once so 
firmly and so flexibly that they shall do 
their own work better. So, on and on, 
to furthest time. All this work, whether 
ours or theirs, is done best when intelli- 
gence best selects, best combines, and 
best radiates — itself nobly submissive 
to the quiveringly balanced conditions 
of its task. Thus we have generalised. 
[ 72 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

All that we can now do more is to at- 
tempt, if only for an instant, to trans- 
late our generalisation into something 
like specific terms. 

In choosing those nearest my own 
experience, I do only what I should 
eagerly expect any one else to do un- 
der similar circumstances. For a good 
many years I have been mostly a 
teacher of literature, whose business 
has been, so far as in me lay, to under- 
stand it, and to impart understanding 
of it to others. Among those others, 
year by year, there have always been 
a few who desired to become teachers 
of literature themselves; as a rule, 
these men have decided to prepare 
themselves for their life work by win- 
ning the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. 
Over and over again we have accord- 
ingly found ourselves deep in discussion 
of how such students should concern 
[ 73 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

themselves with literature. If we had 
all agreed about anything, we should 
not have been human. Unless I am 
wholly mistaken, the while, hardly any 
of us would deny that literature is 
among the enduring expressions of his- 
tory; that among other expressions of 
history, equally significant and mem- 
orable, are the other fine arts and phi- 
losophy; and, to go no further, that the 
vehicle of literature is language. 

Here, instantly, are other rays or 
streams of the force surging about us, 
not to be disdained or neglected by 
those whose chief duty is concerned 
with the vibrant rays of literature 
alone. There was never work of lit- 
erature, from the Homeric poems to 
the yellow journalism of these United 
States of America, not the better to be 
understood for understanding of the 
words put together in its making, of 
[ ^4 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

the historical and social conditions col- 
lected at the moment of its utterance, 
or of what men were painting and 
building and moulding and singing 
and dreaming in the world about it. 
No doubt, all this is already far too 
much for any man of letters to gather 
firmly in any conscious focus. None 
the less, if he forget the existence 
of a single ray of it, he forgets at his 
peril. The most frequent phase of 
such disaster used to be the pedantry 
of the grammarians ; at present it is 
pressed hard by the gossipy minuteness 
of the antiquarians. Our higher duty is 
not to neglect, but to select, and to re- 
ject — that is, so far as our focal business 
is cumulative. Then, within our in- 
most selves, must come the flash which 
can synthesise into new combination 
the rays of force, from near and far, 
most needful for our radiant purpose. 
[ 75 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

Finally must come expression — in no 
wise an end in itself, nor an idol to be 
worshipped for intrinsic monstrosity or 
grace, but an inevitable condition of 
imparting our synthesis to other minds 
than our own. We are at our best when 
we select best, when we best fuse anew 
the vagrant rays which we have select- 
ed, and when our expression flows 
forth with the clear white heat of fresh 
and living fusion. 

So, at least, it has come to seem to 
me, after thirty years of plodding work, 
none too fruitful. There is left us only 
the question of how we should apply 
all this to the patients in our charge, 
suffering until we can turn them adrift 
with what hope of survival may inhere 
in the mystic letters Ph.D. The answer 
is short and, for a wonder, simple. 
Doctors of philosophy must earn their 
degrees chiefly by writing theses. So 
[ 76 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

far as these theses can stimulate at 
once intelligent power of selection, of 
fusion, and of expression, they are 
priceless means of education. So far 
as they either exaggerate or repress in- 
telligence, or selective power, or power 
of fusion, or expression itself, they may 
begin to do more harm than good; and 
harm, like good, and everything else, 
is infinite in its possibilities. Concern- 
ing the present condition of such theses 
I will not further inquire. What the 
future condition of them might con- 
ceivably be we will leave to the dream- 
ers. 

Whereof you will more than prob- 
ably have found me one. Imperfectly 
focal, I fear, and dimly radiant this 
effort of mine to set forth opinion must 
seem. All I can urge in excuse for 
having made such demand on your 
attention is the tremendous truth that 
[ 77 ] 



THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 

this mystery of ours — the mystery of 
education — still retains the marvellous 
power of commanding enthusiastic na- 
tional faith. To any of us who have 
come to feel this, and therewith the 
gravity of our responsibility, no earnest 
effort to confront it can seem a waste 
of time. So if any of you have found 
food for thought in my belief that our 
real task is the fashioning of living 
lenses which shall intelligently accu- 
mulate and radiate streams of the accel- 
erating force in which we are all surging 
toward we know not what, our hour 
together is justified. For it will have 
done its own little part to encourage 
our mystery toward the high hope that 
in the years to come education may 
help make human forces not explosive 
but constructive. 



[ 78 ] 



ra 

THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

An Address before the Public School Teachers of 
Chicago, opening the Elizabeth Kirkland Me- 
morial Lectureship, in January, 1908; repeated 
in substance before the Women's College in 
Brown University, 27 April, 1909. 



Ill 

THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

Mr. President, Ladies and Gentle- 
men: 
The privilege of opening this course of 
lectures is great and grave.* Of all 
human careers that of a teacher some- 
times seems the most desperately mo- 
mentary; to any teacher, at least, the 
course of daily work must often appear 
no better than a changeless recurrence 
of monotonously repetitory routine. 
As year by year, too, pupils pass beyond 
the horizon of a teacher's vision, this 

* The Elizabeth Kirkland Memorial Lectureship 
was founded by the pupils of the late Miss Kirkland 
to provide occasional lectures for the benefit of 
teachers in the Public Schools of Chicago. 

[ 81 ] 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

routine must almost inevitably appear 
to be not only benumbing but fruitless. 
With each new class you find yourself 
just where you began with the last, till 
perforce you fall to wondering whether 
anybody can ever get anywhere, or be 
of any use whatsoever. By the mere 
fact of its existence, such a foundation 
as the Elizabeth Kirkland Memorial 
Lectureship must therefore be a con- 
stant source of incalculable encourage- 
ment. It implies that the faithful life of 
one earnest teacher has borne the fruit 
of living and loving memory; that the 
influence of it is passing beyond the limi- 
tations of any momentary human con- 
ditions; that it has kindled aspiration 
toward ends vaster, higher, more stim- 
ulatingly remote from the deadening re- 
alities of daily labour than any ends, or 
pensions, which such labour can visibly 
attain. So those of us who come, from 

r 82 1 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

time to time, charged with the happy 
duty of keeping this aspiration freshly 
alive, of bearing some message from a 
beloved teacher of the past to faithful 
teachers of the present and of the fu- 
ture, are truly missionaries. 

The mission with which we are 
charged, the while, is in its very essence 
immateria;l — a matter not of the body 
but of the spirit. There was no need 
of a caution kindly given me with the 
summons which has brought me hither 
• — that this is not the moment, if in- 
deed there ever could be a fit moment, 
for dwelling on such matters as the 
fashion of our pedagogic brethren now 
calls equipment or methods. For my 
own part, I am rather disposed to think 
all such discussion abortive. A good 
workman needs few tools; a good 
teacher can teach anyhow and any- 
where ; no equipment or methods can 
[ 83 ] 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

ever take the place, or much alter the 
place, of the one quality which any 
good teacher must essentially possess. 
The quality, to be sure, is so hard to 
name that I shall not vex you with 
efforts to decide what to call it. The 
effect of it any one can see, wherever it 
shines, in the instinctive and persistent 
attitude of pupils. Pupils will always 
recognise a good teacher as their supe- 
rior — their superior surely in all matters 
related to work with which they are 
engaged together, and their superior as 
well, if the superiority is to have endur- 
ing influence, in the more subtle 
yet equally certain matters of mind 
and of character. For your good 
teacher, of whatever grade, must be 
a leader, and a leader so securely 
confident that pupils shall follow not 
reluctantly or by force of discipline, 
but eagerly. 

[ 84 ] 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

Your good teacher, too, must be a 
leader of pupils who, if they continue 
their work of study to the point where 
it approaches maturity, will by and by, 
in the full glory of university standing, 
come to be called by the name of stu- 
dents. Dulled though that word may 
be by the unenlivened commonplace 
of its daily use, the evident meaning of 
it leads us straight toward the vital 
spirit of such life-work as is ours, 
teachers together. It is our business to 
make our pupils — avowed students 
when they get to college, and virtually 
students from the childish moment 
when they first come within our influ- 
ence — strengthen in themselves the 
qualities which shall make their work 
of study not dead but alive, not me- 
chanical but intelligent, not benumbing 
but effective. To accomplish this, I 
believe — so far as accomplishment may 
[ 85 ] 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

lie within our powers — there is only 
one way. We ourselves must never 
cease to be students, too. We must 
grow increasingly older than our pu- 
pils, of course, and if so may be, in- 
creasingly wiser; but neither age nor 
wisdom should ever check — rather, 
both age and wisdom should forever 
impel — our aspiration, as the days pass, 
and the months, and the years, to know 
more and more. We should not only 
long unceasingly to learn more of the 
precise matters with which our daily 
work is concerned; more resolutely 
still, and in far greater degree, we 
should constantly strive to possess our- 
selves of the truths and the mysteries 
which lie highly beyond the initiatory 
drudgeries of our brief, unsatisfactory 
class rooms. 

If these words seem too big to mean 
much, we can soon translate them into 
[ 86 ] 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

simpler terms. Just so far as our teach-^ 
ing makes pupils eager to know more 
than we have time or power to teach 
them, it is a constructive force in their 
lives. Just so far as this work leaves 
us ourselves humbly yet courageously 
aware of how much more we need to 
master before we can begin to do it a 
bit as it ought to be done, it is a con- 
structive force in ours. True study 
keeps us always students, one and all, 
untiring in our search for knowledge 
and for the fruit thereof. Knowledge 
alone may, perhaps, be much — an ad- 
mirable and wonderful treasury of facts, 
of methods, of excellent and far from 
useless detail ; but knowledge alone can 
never be an inspiring ideal. To grow 
into a living force, it must merge itself 
in the more personal, more human 
ideal of wisdom. Gossip, as some 
learned authority has told us, is not 
[ 87 ] 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

history; so long as you know facts only 
apart, even though you know the whole 
encyelopsedia by heart, you know noth- 
ing but gossip ; begin to think even two 
separate facts together, and you have 
begun your understanding of history. 
Our true task is not of accumulation 
but of synthesis, of philosophy. We 
must know our facts, beyond doubt; 
but we must not thereupon rest content. 
We must never cease our willing effort 
to perceive them in constantly new 
lights, as we come to see them, more 
and more, not separately but in their 
mutual relations. 

Now so far as these general consid- 
erations have truth or sense in them, 
they are clearly true of study or of 
teaching throughout the whole range 
of either. They might be illustrated, 
by considering the normal, or, if you 
prefer, the ideal course of development 
[ 88 ] 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

in any range of learning whatsoever. 
Each of us may accordingly turn con- 
fidently for illustration to the matters 
with which he is familiar. This is 
why, professionally occupied with lit- 
erature, I shall not scruple to confine 
your attention to that field. What we 
may perceive there is virtually the 
same that we might perceive anywhere 
else, if we gave ourselves over to the 
guidance of some one elsewhere ex- 
pert. The test of living study is that 
it shall stimulate curiosity, aspiration, 
and willing, almost spontaneous effort. 
So the study of literature is living, with 
pupils and with teachers alike, when it 
keeps them, each in his degree, not 
content to lay aside books when a task 
is done, but eager, from the very im- 
petus of the task, to know literature, 
far and wide, and if so may be, to 
make it. 

[ 89 ] 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

Among American teachers of the 
present day, however, I fear we must all 
agree, the study of literature generally 
begins in a far from alluring form. Un- 
less my experience and observation are 
blindly limited, such of us as are called 
on to devote our lives to this subject, 
which ought to be inspiring, find our 
humane enthusiasm terribly chilled by 
insistent demands for work so remote 
from our ideals that it may well seem 
apart from them altogether. Eager 
though we may be to impart the secret 
of the spirit of letters, we are required, 
during our early professional years and 
sometimes during our whole teaching 
lives, to attempt instruction in English 
composition, and thus to add our own 
shortcomings to the innumerable and 
various shortcomings throughout the 
past of those who have heroically at- 
tempted to impart to unwilling Ameri- 

[ 90 ] 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

can youth the secret of expressing it- 
self in its native language. 

To any conscientious teacher, how- 
ever hopeful or despairing of approach 
to success, this work must often grow 
to seem inhibitory of all else, stultify- 
ing, in certain moods a devoted suicide 
of mind and spirit. Nothing can pre- 
vent it> honestly done, from resolving 
itself into infinite recurrence of petty 
detail, inevitable and almost mechan- 
ical. I have known a professor, in 
one of our older colleges, who had to 
correct hundreds of themes a month, 
who was said to do so with punctilious 
accuracy, and who has been heard to 
assert that the one circumstance which 
enabled him to preserve his reason 
through this arduously obscure career 
was that he could read themes punctili- 
ously for hours without any conscious- 
ness of what either he or they were 
[ 91 ] 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

about. By some dispensation of divine 
grace he could put to sleep all but the 
theme-reading faculty which had nearly 
become to him, at least professionally, 
the only visible end and aim of tedi- 
ously despairing earthly life. 

No distortion of human nature could 
be much more abortive than that into 
which this good man thus came near 
falling. Detail, to be sure, is never 
negligible. We neglect it at our peril, 
not only in such grave matters as our 
educational work, but in table man- 
ners, or in clothes. There is a certain 
positive importance in forks and in 
tooth-brushes. When details, how- 
ever, come to seem the chief facts of 
human existence, — when you find your- 
self, for example, disposed to believe 
that the manner in which fellow-beings 
hold their knives or punctuate their 
paragraphs is primarily vital to the 
[ 92 ] 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

welfare of the universe, — you may feel 
sadly sure that you are well on your 
way to accept a scheme of life untrue 
for want of immensity. That way lies 
atrophy. We can see the gauntness 
thereof in pupils, or in ourselves, when 
either of us begins to imagine that the 
chief end of our effort to compose is 
the obedient observance of accepted 
rules. 

Something else than gauntness, on 
the other hand, will gleam inspiritingly 
before us all, teachers and pupils alike, 
in those rarer moments when for a 
little while we can perceive the real 
place of detail or of rule in the whole 
structure of vigorous learning. To 
most of us such moments come only 
at sadly remote intervals; clear vision 
can persist only with a very few. The 
most bewildered of us, however, can 
sometimes feel that, in their proper 

[ 93 ] 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

places, rules and details are priceless; 
that their places are those wherein they 
can aid us toward the one ideal end of 
all study of composition; and that this 
ideal end is expression as nearly ade- 
quate as our earthly powers can make 
it. There is no deeper folly than that 
which would maintain literary art to 
stop short when it reaches the lower 
limits of poetry, or of imaginative 
creation. In its own lesser way a let- 
ter, an examination book, a college 
thesis — or whatever else your poetaster 
would most disdain — may surely be 
a work of art, and as a work of art a 
thing of beauty. Whenever we can 
assert it exquisitely adapted to its pur- 
pose, slight and fleeting though that 
purpose be, we may honestly delight in 
it as a fragment of literature. 

If teachers or students of English 
composition can make themselves thus 
[ 94 ] 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

view the work before them, that work 
takes on a new and a brighter aspect. 
Even their benumbingly recurrent ex- 
perience of technical detail, unconse- 
crated by the reverend traditions which 
make the minutiae of the classical gram- 
mars a mysterious initiation into the 
communion of ancestral learning, can 
come to be an incentive toward the 
making of literature — of "the lasting 
expression in words of the meaning of 
life." Unless we can feel the end of 
composition to be the making of liter- 
ature, I believe, any student thereof, 
teacher or pupil, must find the task be- 
fore him despairing, withering, mortal. 
The moment any of us can steadfastly 
perceive the true height of our purpose, 
however, a new vista opens. There 
are limitless fields for us to explore — 
limitless regions for alert study, vagrant 
or systematic, as the case maybe. Who- 
[ 95 ] 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

ever is even remotely concerned with the 
making of literature is confronted with 
a task which should put his highest 
powers to the test. For thus, whatever 
our accomplishment, we begin to meas- 
ure ourselves with those who have ap- 
proached success in the fine art wherein 
we find ourselves bravely experimental. 
So far as we, here and now, are ever to 
make literature at all, we can soon see, 
we shall contribute our own part, great 
or small, to the already extensive liter- 
ature of America. 

Very likely, for some little time past, 
these observations of mine may have 
seemed aimlessly vagrant. Pretending 
to invite you to listen to some consider- 
ations concerning the study of literature, 
I have first indulged myself in rather 
elusive generalisations, and have then 
discussed, in none too enthusiastic tem- 
per, a matter so remote from literature 
[ 96 ] 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

in our daily lives as the teaching of 
boys and girls how to write the English 
language. If I be not all in error, the 
while, I have led you along a road more 
regular than it may have seemed. 
Regular, I mean, because, at least so far 
as I have been able to observe, most 
of us who have been engaged anywhere 
in the teaching of composition, have 
found ourselves, often with little special 
preparation for the task, called upon 
to teach as well — or as ill, if you prefer, 
— something about the literature of our 
native country. The two things some- 
how hang together. 

In itself this new call is stimulating. 
It opens for us new fields of exploration, 
far more invigorating than those where 
we have begun to labour. The very 
extent of their range, though, is bewil- 
dering, and bewildering most of all to 
faithful spirits who have come, from 
[ 97 ] 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

sad experience, to believe or to as- 
sume that honest work, exploratory or 
cultivating, must always be a matter of 
conscientious detail. We have gener- 
alised so much that I shall ask no in- 
dulgence for illustrating what I mean 
by a specific instance. Not very long 
ago I received from a polite stranger 
somewhere in the West a letter of which 
the gently diflBdent temper was implied 
by a postage stamp, duly enclosed, to 
expedite my reply. The writer, it ap- 
peared, was a student, occupied, while 
pursuing some study of what he called 
American Literature, with the prepa- 
ration of a paper about James Russell 
Lowell. 

Now, as a matter of familiar and ac- 
knowledged fact, Lowell was a mem- 
ber of the class of 1838 at Harvard 
College, where he was duly elected, or 
appointed, class poet. He accordingly 
[ 98 ] 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

wrote a class poem, in no wise mem- 
orable, which was subsequently printed 
in a small pamphlet, dear to collectors 
by reason of his subsequent and de- 
served eminence. It is also true that he 
got into some sort of trouble with the 
college authorities. There is a legend, 
I know not how authoritative, that a 
grave and reverend personage, conduct- 
ing college prayers, closed his eyes as he 
lifted face and voice in petition to our 
Creator; that, upon some eloquent 
reference in his prayer to his aspirations 
for the undergraduates collected at his 
feet, one of them politely bowed, as an 
acknowledgment of this intercessory 
courtesy; that other students godlessly 
tittered ; and that the devout divine, 
thereupon opening one or both of his 
eyes, discerned the urbanely saluting 
figure of young Lowell, who was pres- 
ently rusticated in consequence. 
[ 99 ] 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

The story may be quite apocryphal. 
Something or other, however, — and 
something not in the least disgraceful, — 
certainly clouded the serenity of Low- 
ell's undergraduate relations with the 
college authorities. This fact is touched 
on, I believe, in various biographical 
notices of this distinguished man of let- 
ters, some of which state that it pre- 
vented him from delivering his class 
poem; others of which intimate that 
the poem was duly read in public, de- 
spite his discipline. This divergence 
of opinion happened to excite the in- 
terest of my Western correspondent; he 
wrote to inquire whether Lowell's class 
poem, accessible in print, was duly de- 
livered or not, in 1838. My answer, 
I fear, displeased him; for, perhaps be- 
cause of my neglect to enclose a stamp, 
he never did me the kindness to ac- 
knowledge it. In substance, it was that 
[ 100 ] 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

I had no idea whether the poem was 
actually given before a duly assembled 
audience or not; that the general cir- 
cumstances of Lowell's boyish temper, 
the only thing which could make the 
question interesting, were admitted by 
everybody ; and that any student who 
should waste his time on so immaterial 
a question of detail ran the risk of 
never knowing why Lowell, or any 
other American man of letters, should 
be any more worth writing about than 
if they had never written a paragraph. 
Quite possibly, some of you may 
think this line of comment heartlessly 
unsympathetic. I did not mean it so. 
To my mind, it was the best lesson 
which, as an honest teacher of litera- 
ture in America, I could give oflP-hand 
to an earnest student of this not too 
comprehensive phase of human expres- 
sion. One might fairly assume that 
[ 101 ] 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

his true purpose was to possess hiraself 
of the body, and if so might be of the 
spirit as well, of those American pub- 
lications which together have proved 
themselves lasting enough to be re- 
garded as enduring literature. Any 
question of gossipy personal detail, 
just like any considerable study of 
ephemeral or trivial or obsolete writings 
produced at any time by our fellow- 
countrymen, would thus be a danger- 
; ous distraction. The details of Lowell's 
college scrape had no more to do with 
what makes Lowell memorable than 
had the breed of the hens whose eggs he 
habitually ate for breakfast at the age 
of ten. |Whoever supposed that they 
had, was as far from intelligent study of 
the real literature of our country as if 
he were wasting precious time on the 
Puritan sermons of the Seventeenth 
Century, or on the scribblings of good 
[ 102 ] 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

men who tried to make literature be- 
tween the Revolution and the year 
1800. nrhe best advice I knew how to 
give any earnest student of our Uterary 
history was to back out of these thick- 
ets, and once in the open to ask him- 
self, without any distraction of detail, 
what the literature of America really is. 
To this question, the answer is at 
once so clear and so evident that you 
will find half the students who ought to 
know it — teachers and pupils alike — 
groping in the dark. Beyond perad- 
venture, the memorable literature of 
America — and therefore the only litera- 
ture of America as yet worth general 
study — is that part of English literature 
which was produced in the United 
States during the first three-quarters of 
the Nineteenth Century. What came 
before is clearly of no more than his- 
torical interest; what has ensued is still 
[ 103 ] 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

too near us for ultimate critical classi- 
fication. 

A part of English literature I have 
called the literature of our country, for 
the obvious reason that it is written in 
the English language; and thus, in its 
own way, is as integral a part of Eng- 
lish literature as the Idyls of Theoc- 
ritus are a part of Greek. When we 
consider any literature so broadly as 
we are considering our subject now, — 
or as I believe that any wise teacher 
may best make ignorant but curious 
pupils consider it, to begin with, — we 
can wisely touch only on the writers 
who have emerged and have endured 
as important. When we thus consider 
the literature of America, we shall 
accordingly find not only that its pres- 
ent limits are no more extensive than 
I have just stated, but that within 
those limits there are as yet only ten 
[ 104 ] 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

indisputably memorable names. These 
names, already familiar everywhere, 
bid fair to stay so. They are the 
names of Irving and Cooper, of Bryant 
and Poe; and of Emerson, Longfellow, 
Lowell, Holmes, Whittier, and Haw- 
thorne. 

Some, I know, would clamorously 
add to the list that of Walt Whitman. 
Add it, if you like; to my mind he is 
too eccentric, and too far from any- 
thing like popular appeal to his com- 
patriots, for any such certainty of 
distinction. If urgently bidden to in- 
crease the company, I should be far 
more disposed to add the more gracious 
and beautiful name of Sidney Lanier. 
This very budding dispute will go far, I 
think, to prove the accuracy of the list 
I have ventured to set down as un- 
questionably deserving our attention. 
Other writers than these ten are not 
[ 105 ] 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

to be neglected or altogether forgotten ; 
no more are other periods than those 
in which these ten lived and moved 
and had their being and did their 
work. In such broadly general con- 
siderations as ours, however, other 
periods in our literary history and 
other American writers may best be 
regarded, almost like the boyish pranks 
of Lowell, as matters of detail. They 
are to be thought of, if at all, and in that 
case to be thought with, not as primarily 
important, but only so far as they can 
help us to define our impressions of the 
few works and authors acknowledged to 
be our most characteristic and our best. 
Their function, in such study as we are 
now concerned with, is to help us un- 
derstand the nature of the approach to 
excellence made by the Americans whose 
writings are most nearly excellent. 
These by themselves are enough and to 
[ 106 ] 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

spare for all but exceptionally well-in- 
formed students. Repeat the ten names 
again if you will. You can hardly help 
feeling a glow of patriotic complacency, 
as they remind you of what pure- 
hearted work our country has added, 
during the century lately past, to the 
literature of the English language. 

If I have seemed to repeat that ref- 
erence to the literature of the Eng- 
lish language unduly, the point at 
which we have now arrived may, per- 
haps, win me justification. Any vital 
study, I hope we are agreed, must lead 
us beyond its own limits. Thus, a little 
while ago, we discovered that vital 
study of English Composition in Amer- 
ica would lead us almost insensibly to 
study of our national literature. Now, 
very little later, we discover that the 
study of literature in America will 
similarly lead us, half unawares, to the 
[ 107 ] 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

consideration, and probably to the 
study as well, of the whole range of 
English literature throughout the Nine- 
teenth Century. 

A moment ago, we indulged ourselves 
in the pleasure of patriotic compla- 
cency, as we surveyed the work of the 
ten American men of letters who have 
emerged superior to their contempo- 
raries. Complacency does one good 
only if it stop short of fatuousness. This 
reference to the literature of England 
may thus prove tonic. Our eminent 
literary worthies were not only con- 
temporaries of our somewhat less dis- 
tinguished compatriots whom we have 
not troubled ourselves to recall by 
name. They were men, too, of the 
century which added to English liter- 
ature the works of Wordsworth, of 
Coleridge, of Shelley, of Keats, of By- 
ron, and of Scott; of Tennyson and of 

[ 108 ] 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

Browning; of Dickens, of Thackeray, 
and of George Eliot; and, to go no 
further, of Macaulay, of Carlyle, and 
of Ruskin. The list might extend far 
longer; as it stands, it is enough for 
our purposes, corrective and scholarly 
alike. By the side of their English ri- 
vals the glories of our American constel- 
lation do not shine so supremely bright 
as we let ourselves fancy when we con- 
templated them alone. They are not 
quenched, nor even quite dimmed ; only 
their magnitude no longer seems so 
positively imposing as we had fancied. 
To put the case at its mildest, the Eng- 
lish literature of the Nineteenth Century 
is quite as significant as the literature 
of America, in which we were tempted 
to take perhaps overweening pride. 

What is more, we must presently 
admit, the English literature of the 
Nineteenth Century by no means com- 
[ 109 ] 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

prises all the literature of what we still 
regard as our Mother Country. Taken 
by itself, to be sure, it seems quite as 
important as the whole literature of 
America, from the beginning to this 
day. Yet before the eldest of the Eng- 
lishmen whom we have named wrote 
a line, English literature possessed 
names in plenty at least as memorable 
as his. A very few of them, taken al- 
most at random, should serve our pur- 
pose now. When Wordsworth was 
born, English literature already pos- 
sessed the work of Johnson, for exam- 
ple, of Pope, of Addison, of Dryden, of 
Milton, of Bacon, of Shakspere, of 
Spenser, and of Chaucer. 

The very mention of these names will 
already have reminded you of a hun- 
dred others whom we cannot pause to 
recognize, one by one. It will have re- 
minded you, too, of other matters than 
[ 110 ] 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

individual authors which must be duly 
considered by any vital study of English 
literature : the Periodical Essay, for one 
thing; the Elizabethan Drama, for 
another; and for a third, the romantic 
poetry of the glowing Middle Ages. 
At due times and seasons, these and 
their like may well occupy studious 
years or careers. What concerns us 
at this moment, however, is rather the 
general question which begins to de- 
fine itself stimulatingly and surely 
above and beyond other questions and 
lesser. Where, we must surely find our- 
selves wondering, does this English lit- 
erature belong, whereof our own liter- 
ature of America is only one little part ? 
What is its final place, superb though 
it be by itself, in the whole scheme of 
literature toward perception of which 
the course of our study is beginning to 
lead us ? 

I ni ] 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

Thus considering English literature, 
we can presently discern it as one, and 
as only one, of at least five still vigorous 
literatures which now constitute the 
fundamental literature of Europe. We 
need hardly stop to name them— the 
literatures of France, of Italy, of Spain, 
of Germany, and this of our old an- 
cestral England. Nebulous in their 
beginnings, they have all come into their 
full existence during the past six hun- 
dred years. What is more, in the course 
of their separately contemporaneous 
development they have incessantly and 
intricately interacted from their begin- 
nings even unto this day. A long way 
we may now seem from the Puritan pul- 
pits of New England, from American 
poetasters of the Eighteenth Century, 
from Lowell's class poem, delivered or 
not as the case may be in that fading 
summer of 1838, or from problems as 
[ 112 ] 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

to when you should use shall and when 
will. Yet the road we have travelled 
has been straight from that dreary hol- 
low of our daily school-rooms to this 
height where we are seeking to discern, 
in full open air, no longer what Ameri- 
can literature is — if, indeed, America 
can as yet be said to possess anything 
quite worthy of so portentous a name — 
nor yet what English literature is, in 
its whole broad compass, but rather 
what that greater fact is, which com- 
prises them both and so much more, 
too, — the lasting literature of Europe. 

Beyond attempting an answer to this 
question I shall not pretend to guide 
your thoughts, or further to trouble 
you, to-day. Slight, elementary, obvi- 
ous though the answer be, it should 
serve, I think, the chief purpose of our 
present conference. This is to assure 
ourselves that just as when the snares 
[ lis ] 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

of detail entangle the course of the spirit 
the study of literature is inhumanly be- 
numbing, so when we can shake our- 
selves free from them this same study 
reveals itself as quiveringly human, in- 
exhaustibly stimulating. It is my hope 
that I may indicate to you, though never 
so slightly, where you and I, who give 
our lives to teaching in modern Amer- 
ica, have our own little place in the 
great whole of the literature of Europe. 
If so, we shall not have wasted the time 
we shall have passed together. 

Broadly speaking, any one can see, 
the literature of Europe is divided into 
two distinct parts, or perhaps three, 
which together express the meaning of 
life as life has revealed itself to the 
European mind during the past twenty- 
five hundred years. The two completely 
distinct parts are commonly called an- 
cient and modern; between them is a 
[ 114 ] 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

long interval, not so clearly defined in 
literature as that which preceded or as 
that which has ensued ; its transitional 
obscurity, fascinatingly indistinct, com- 
bines with its position in historic time 
to give it the conventional name of 
mediaeval. Antiquity, as expressed in ^ 
literature, was purely European. The 
Middle Ages was a period when the 
other than European tradition of the 
Christian religion fused with the pre- 
viously unmixed traditions of antique 
Europe. Modernity remains a period 
when people sprung from generations of 
these fused traditions have attempted, 
in various ways and with various de- 
grees of success, to revive something like 
the antique purity of European com- 
pleteness. To know our own place, as 
teachers of literature — or, at our high- 
est, as makers of it, or at least as stimu- 
lators of others to make it — we must 
[ 115 ] 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

be aware of all these periods which have 
gone before us. If so may be, we must 
grow aware of them humanly enough 
to make us long to know each and all 
better and better. So when, for these 
few coming moments, we here glance 
at them, in turn, we must not forget 
that we do so only to remind ourselves 
of what vast fields they offer for our 
straying, even though we never stray 
anywhere near their extreme limits. 

When we thus consider the literature 
of antiquity, we can instantly see that, 
in turn, it divides itself clearly into two, 
and only two, distinct parts : the primal 
literature of Greece and the imperial 
literature of Rome. There is no need 
to remind ourselves that each of these 
by itself has proved more than enough 
to occupy the whole scholarly energy of 
centuries of lifetimes. To master either 
has long since been a feat beyond the 
[ "6 ] 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

power of any but special, laborious, de- 
voted students. In this, however, I see 
no reason for despairing revulsion into a 
mood where any of us should feel hope- 
less of acquaintance with either. It is 
with each of them as we found the case 
to be, a little while ago, with our own 
beginnings of literature in America, or 
with the strong, perennially vigorous 
literature of England. From the num- 
berless writers who have combined to 
make any literature in the complex 
unity of its entirety, a few have emerged 
eminent; and from the work of these 
few any who will read them, even in 
the veiled disguise of enthusiastic trans- 
lation, may come to know more of the 
spirit of the nations and the epochs 
which they express than is always 
vouchsafed to your plodding scholar, 
burrowing in detail until he cares 
mostly for technical exactitude. 
[ "7 ] 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

The literature of Greece, for exam- 
ple, I have called primal. Any of you 
who know it at all, I think, will have 
some glimmering of the conception I 
have thus tried to summarise in a single 
and far from vivid word. It is that 
of the human mind, at last fully awak- 
ened in the form which we now recog- 
nise as European, face to face with 
concepts as wide and as varied as the 
range of mortal intellect can know; 
and troubled with no other perplexity 
than must always be involved in the acts 
of perception and of expression. The 
Greek, I mean, was free to see what he 
could, and to set it forth as best he might, 
untroubled by inhibitory consciousness 
of excellent standards to which he must 
in scholarly decency conform. With 
all its ultimate maturity of expression, 
with all its immense range of human 
perception, the literature of Greece has 
[ 118 ] 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

in it something of the primal simplicity 
and dignity of childhood. 

One might thus comment forever ; it 
is better instantly to specify what I am 
trying to make clear. Read the first of 
European epics, in the poems of Homer ; 
the first ripe European lyrics, in the 
verses attributed to Anacreon and to 
Sappho and in the Odes of Pindar; 
read dramatic poetry, sprung to life 
and almost supremely alive, in the 
tragedy of iEschylus, of Sophocles, 
and of Euripides, and in the comedy 
of Aristophanes; read history, unprec- 
edented until it stands forth mature 
in the pages of Herodotus, of Thucyd- 
ides, and of Xenophon; in Xenophon, 
again, and in Plato read of Socrates, 
and find philosophy made into litera- 
ture ; and marvel at the cosmic method 
of Aristotle, at the final eloquence of 
Demosthenes, and at exquisitely dainty 
[ "9 ] 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

idyls of Theocritus. This whole task 
is not appalling. Any of us could read 
every line I have touched on in the 
course of a single summer vacation. 
Thereby any of us could come to know, 
and to know in such humanity as should 
make him eager to read on whenever he 
could, not the whole literature of 
Greece, but enough to assure him for- 
ever of its enduringly primal splendour. 
Theocritus, the last Greek I have 
mentioned, flourished some three cen- 
turies before the Christian era. At that 
moment there was no other lasting 
literature in all Europe than theirs of 
Greece ; and it was nearly two hun- 
dred years later when the literature of 
European antiquity began to be com- 
pleted by the lasting literature of Rome. 
Imperial, I have called it, for the influ- 
ence of it remains potent even to this 
remote day; and for one scholar, 
[ 120 ] 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

through the centuries, who could read 
his Greek unaided there have been 
thousands who could make something 
out of the original pages of the Latin. 
Magnificent though Latin literature be, 
however, it is in certain aspects second- 
ary. We need no deep learning to 
perceive that not a line of its enduring 
masterpieces was penned by any but 
men saturated with Greek culture, and 
reverencing Greek style as the match- 
less model of excellence. Primality 
can exist only once ; nothing can revive 
it, any more than years can revive the 
clear-eyed purity of childhood. 

You will feel what I mean when I 
hasten over the great literary names of 
Rome, even more summarily than I 
have hastened over those of Greece. 
Plautus and Terence begin the splen- 
did story with their comedies full of 
Greek tradition; Lucretius could not 
[ 121 ] 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

have made his wondrous didactic 
poem but for the wondrous thought 
of Epicurus; nor could Catullus have 
made his lyrics without the Greek lyr- 
ics to guide him. What is true of these 
writers is true, in other ways, of the 
rest who together make up the tremen- 
dous literature of the Romans — of Cic- 
ero, and even of Caesar; of Virgil, of 
Horace, and of Ovid; of Livy and of 
Tacitus; of Juvenal and of Martial. 
Together, just as our Americans have 
reminded us of America, our Englishmen 
of England, and our Greeks of Greece, 
these thirteen undying names may re- 
mind us of what the literature of Rome 
was, and the temper of Rome, from the 
end of the Second Century before Christ 
to the beginning of the Second Century 
of the Christian Era — ^from the final 
days of the Republic to the reign of the 
twelfth of the Twelve Csesars. 
[ 122 ] 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

Imperial and decadent at once we 
must find that elder Europe, in the last 
days of its unmixed antiquity. To bring 
forth the times to come, it needed the 
advent of a spirit other than its own. 
That spirit was already at hand. It 
was under that same twelfth of the 
Twelve Caesars, some authorities still as- 
sure uSj — under that same Domitian, — 
that the last survivor of the Twelve 
Apostles wrote the last book of the New 
Testament. True or not, in the clear 
white light of the Higher Criticism, this 
current legend brings us straight to that 
other than European phase of antique 
humanity which was destined to surge 
traditionally forward, as the old Euro- 
pean empire of Rome resolved itself into 
the separate nationalities of Christen- 
dom. The books in which these new 
traditions are recorded have become the 
most familiar in the European world, 
[ 123 ] 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

even to the countless millions who have 
never opened these pages. In the Old 
Testament is preserved the whole lit- 
erature of the Hebrews, barbarian to 
the Greeks, and older, I believe, than 
almost anything which the Greeks have 
left us. In the New Testament, this He- 
brew tradition, amid the tremendous 
agony of imperial Rome, is f ocussed to 
the highest point of its religious efficacy. 
We have no time now to wander into 
the adjacent fields of history. We can 
hardly help seeing, the while, that they 
are close beside us — that to understand 
literature a bit as those who made 
it meant it we must never forget the 
circumstances of their earthly expe- 
rience. So it is not too wide an ex- 
cursion from the literature which is 
our true concern together to remind 
ourselves that during the centuries 
when Barbarians finally broke the unity 
[ 124 ] 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

of the Empire, the Church persisted, 
until one might almost summarise the 
story by asserting that the Twelve 
Caesars were supplanted by the Twelve 
Apostles. 

Then came the thousand years and 
more which the careless usage of our 
time is still apt to summarise under the 
intangible name of the Middle Ages. 
Literature they have left us, various 
and in plenty — from the solemn works 
of the Fathers of the Church to the 
hauntingly imaginative beginnings of 
every strain of modern letters which 
has ensued. Yet what the Middle Ages 
have most surely transmitted to modern 
times is not so much enduring litera- 
ture as enduring tradition — the stuff 
from which enduring literature is made. 
We can glance at only a few examples 
of this, but these few should suflfice us 
now. It is to the Middle Ages that we 
[ 125 ] 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

owe the traditions of the Church and 
of the Holy Roman Empire ; of the 
knightly heroes, such as Charlemagne 
and Arthur; of the saints, from the 
Fathers themselves, and George with 
his Dragon, to Dominic and to Francis 
of Assisi. It is to the Middle Ages that 
we owe the ideals of chivalry, of hon- 
our, of courtesy, and of devotion to 
ideal womanhood. It is to them that 
we owe the whole range of fascinating 
and inspiring emotion which we are 
accustomed to call by the vague name 
romantic. It was during these same 
ten centuries that nationalities came 
into their modern being. It was at the 
close of these centuries that all the past 
at which we have been glancing to- 
gether was wondrously summarised in 
that marvellous poem of which the sub- 
stance is the final expression of medi- 
aeval literature and the style is the 
[ 126 ] 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

primal expression of modern. I mean 
the Divine Comedy of Dante. 

Mediaeval though the spirit be in 
which he would fix forever the porten- 
tous past, the passionate present, and 
the eternal future, obedient to the 
mystic love which moves the sun and 
the other stars, there can be no doubt 
that his great work, in a modern vernac- 
ular, is at the same time the first persis- 
tent monument of what the subsequent 
literature of Europe was to be. Inevita- 
bly this literature has become a matter 
of numerous nationalities, each with its 
distinct and separate language. When 
we first approached the question of 
what European literature is — the litera- 
ture of which English literature, and ours 
of America, is only a part — ^we named 
its five chief phases : the Italian, the 
French, the Spanish, the German, and 
our English itself. At no one time 
[ 127 ] 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

throughout their six centuries of con- 
temporaneous development have they 
all flourished equally. At diflferent 
periods each has been stirred, in vari- 
ous ways, by forces seemingly peculiar 
to itself. We need no great keenness of 
vision, however, to perceive that, on 
the whole, the greater of these forces, 
however distorted in momentary aspects, 
have really been vitally common to 
them all. We have no time left us now 
to linger even over such magnificently 
memorable details as the chief names of 
European literature, apart from Eng- 
lish, during the past six hundred years. 
We can only recall a very few of the 
most significant : Petrarch, for example, 
and Boccaccio; Ariosto and Machia- 
velli; Luther, Tasso, Cervantes, Rabe- 
lais, and Montaigne ; Corneille, Moliere, 
and Racine; Voltaire and Rousseau; 
Goethe and Schiller. All we can hope 
[ 128 ] 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

to do more, here and now, is to recog- 
nise how profoundly Uterature and 
history are fused, and thus attempt to 
perceive some broadest traits of the six 
centuries throughout which Europe has 
incessantly expressed itself from the 
days of Dante to these times in which 
we ourselves live. 

The. broadest trait of all, I believe, is 
clear throughout them from beginning to 
end. From the Fourteenth Century to 
this Twentieth, of which no one now liv- 
ing may ever know the full course, the 
mind of Europe has been rebellious 
against the authority of tradition ; it has 
sought to be reasonable — to know rather 
than to believe. This dominant spirit 
may, perhaps, be summarised as the crit- 
ical ; there has everywhere been a con- 
stant eagerness to see things as they 
really are. In the Fourteenth Century 
and the Fifteenth, this spirit showed 
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THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

itself most characteristically in relation 
to the facts of civilised antiquity — of art 
and of culture. What resulted was that 
revival of antique ideals to which we 
give the name of Renaissance. In the 
Sixteenth Century, the critical spirit was 
applied most signally to matters not of 
historical and artistic tradition but of 
religious ; and we should not summarise 
that century ill if we called it once for all 
the century of the Reformation, In the 
Seventeenth Century and the Eigh- 
teenth, the most ardent activities of the 
critical spirit were exhibited in matters 
of politics and of government ; wherefore 
these centuries culminated in the still 
portentous fact of Revolution. During 
the Nineteenth Century, with its mar- 
vellously increased mastery of science, 
the critical spirit has been engaged most 
alertly and most passionately with the 
temporal welfare of human beings ; you 
[ 130 ] 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

and I were born, and shall die, in a period 
of which the dominant passion is for Re- 
form. Again, it may seem to you that 
I have strayed from literature. Yet it 
is from the study of literature that I 
have been impelled to make these huge 
generalisations. Reflect, if you ever 
care to, on the names of the masters 
whom we have recalled together, from 
Francis Petrarch to Thomas Carlyle. 
You will marvel, I believe, at the pre- 
cision with which you will find them to 
define these consecutive phases of the 
time spirit, working its way, for good 
or for ill, irresistibly. 

Further than this we cannot go to- 
gether now. All that is left me is to re- 
peat, if I can, some summary of the 
message which, as a teacher, I have 
striven to bring to you who teach. Our 
daily work, we should all agree, must 
mostly seem humble and dreary. Yet 
[ 131 ] 



THE STUDY OP LITERATURE 

even though our study of literature, 
which we have taken as an example of 
any range of study whatsoever, seem 
at first abortive, it can lead us, we have 
seen, to ranges of thought where centu- 
ries have not yet suflSced humanity to 
attain the lofty level of certainty. They 
have thus led us to regions where you 
and I, as eager students, may forever 
mount upward, and where, so mount- 
ing, we may forever lead the students 
who shall follow us. If your work 
and mine, as students and as teachers, 
be faithfully done, it cannot fail to 
help the students of the future, just 
as our own work has been helped 
by the work of the students of the past. 
A trite message, after all, this may 
seem; yet the very fact of its triteness 
goes far to prove both the truth of it 
and the need. If any of you have felt 
it needful and truthful, it has been 
[ 132 ] 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

worth while. Surely, too, there could 
have been no happier moment for such 
a message than that which has here 
brought us together. What one faithful 
teacher has done for us who follow her 
is attested by the establishment of this 
lectureship in her memory, sustaining 
the work of her spirit long after her 
daily work has come to its peaceful end. 



[ 133 ] 



rv 

THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

A Conunencement Address at the College of 
Charleston, South Carolina, 15 June, 1909. 

First printed in the Charleston "Sunday News," 
20 June, 1909. 



IV 

THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

Mr. President, and Gentlemen of 
THE College of Charleston: 

The honour you have done me comes 
with all the grace of unexpected re- 
newal. Once before you were so kind 
as to invite me to take part in an occa- 
sion like this. No invitation was ever 
more welcome. All my life I had 
eagerly wished to know something of the 
South^ — not as a student, or a traveller, 
but as a human being, mingling for a 
little while with Southern fellow-coun- 
trymen in their habit as they live. There 
could have been no happier opportu- 
nity to do so than your invitation 
[ 137 ] 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

brought me — few keener regrets than 
that with which I found myself com- 
pelled to leave long hope unfulfilled. 
That you should have cared to sum- 
mon me again, and at a moment when 
I could respond to the summons, there- 
fore means that what had seemed fatally 
lost is restored with a glow of hospi- 
table reiteration never to be forgotten. 
Nor is this all. In calling me from 
Harvard College to address men who 
have loyally pursued their studies in 
the College of Charleston, you have 
done something more than a friendly 
act from men to man, from colleagues 
to colleague, or from institution to in- 
stitution; you have happily urged that 
for a little while, at a moment such as 
often lingers long in the memory of 
those in whose lives it marks an epoch, 
Massachusetts should speak to South 
Carolina, Boston to Charleston. There 
[ 138 ] 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

could be no more hearty message of 
peace and goodwill. 

Yet if you have supposed that I 
could speak to you in any ofl&cial char- 
acter, I can hardly fulfil your expecta- 
tions. Throughout the career of the 
eminent man who has just withdrawn 
from the presidency of Harvard Col- 
lege, he has maintained there a remark- 
able degree of personal liberty. One 
and all of us have been free as air to say 
everywhere whatever seemed to us true 
or wise. With that privilege the very 
purity of our liberty has brought our 
authority to an end. None of us can 
pretend, any more than President Eliot 
has pretended, to speak for others. 
Whatever a Harvard man utters — ex- 
cept at the rare moments when he is 
charged with a formal academic mis- 
sion, and therefore is told just what to 
say — must be taken as coming only 
[ 139 ] 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

from him, and in no wise implicating 
even his nearest colleagues — ^far less the 
College, or the University, which we serve 
in common. What is more, our deepest 
community, at that immemorial nurs- 
ery of traditional and extreme Protest- 
antism, lies in tolerated divergence of 
opinion. No two of us think quite alike. 
We live together somehow. Radical 
and Conservative, Tory and Revolu- 
tionary, heretic and orthodox, at one 
only in faith that the truth shall prevail. 
At a time like this, accordingly, I can 
bring you no message but my own. It 
is implicitly from the North, no doubt, 
for the reason that I have always lived 
there, seeing things from the angle 
whence Northerners of the past fifty 
years must perforce have observed the 
mysteries of time and space and eter- 
nity. It is implicitly from Massachu- 
setts, because I was born there, and 
[ 140 ] 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

have lived there most of my life. It is 
implicitly from Harvard where I not 
only took my degree, but where I have 
been a teacher since I was less than 
half my present age. I cannot speak 
to you, however, for Harvard or for 
Massachusetts, or for the North. I 
can speak only for myself, man to man. 
I come, in fine, as one whose mature 
years have been wholly passed amid 
American academic surroundings, to 
say what best I can at a moment when 
a little company of others are just 
emerging from such academic sur- 
roundings to confront hereafter, I sup- 
pose, — at least in most cases, — other and 
widely different conditions. 

At such a moment one inevitably 
stops to think; and when one stops to 
think nowadays, one almost inevitably 
falls to asking oneself troublous ques- 
tions. Cui bono? is among the most in- 
[ 141 ] 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

sistently recurrent of them. We college 
men differ from the unnumbered ma- 
jority of our fellow-citizens in that be- 
tween the common routine of school 
training and the arduous reality of in- 
exorable fact we have paused, through 
four years of something no longer youth 
and not yet manhood, to gather strength, 
memories, traditions, which shall help 
us through the years to come. How has 
this college interval helped us, after all ? 
not a few of us must ask; what is the 
use of it.^ to whom has it done what 
manner of good ? 

Unless your experience hereabouts 
be widely different from any which has 
gladdened the region I come from — 
different, as well, from that of the stu- 
dents who year after year have made 
their way from the South, and from the 
West, and from elsewhere to pursue 
graduate studies at Harvard — a dis- 
[ 142 ] 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

concerting fact must be acknowledged 
once for all. Men who have never been 
at college imagine that our college years 
have taught us something positive — 
how to read foreign languages, for ex- 
ample, how to appreciate literature and 
fine art, or how to practise with skill 
certain of the arts not called fine, how 
to apply science or to conduct affairs. 
They assume that an academic degree 
stamps us as somehow expert. We 
graduates of colleges have the sad mis- 
fortune to know better. Few of us, for 
example, who have studied French or 
German for years, can pretend to use 
a text-book in either language — ^far less 
turn to the literature of either, as a 
matter of pleasure. Hardly one of us 
unaided by translation, I venture to 
guess, can make much sense out of a 
page of Latin or of Greek. Very few 
could tell you, off-hand, the century in 
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THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

which Herodotus wrote or Cicero, could 
distinguish between St. Gregory and 
Hildebrand, could give a clear account 
of Lady Jane Grey, could name the 
Presidents of the United States, could 
explain why no one who understands 
Elizabethan literature has ever sup- 
posed that the author of Bacon's Essays 
wrote "Hamlet" and the "Tempest," 
or could expound the principles of 
Descartes, of Locke, or of John 
Stuart Mill. Very few, either, could be 
trusted to make an accurate survey of 
land; to identify a mineral, a shrub, or 
a bone; to understand the published 
statement of a bank; or even to help 
a little brother through the perplexities 
of a new algebraic problem or geomet- 
rical proposition. Far from becoming 
expert anywhere during our college 
years, we are more likely to have lost 
what little pretension to expert knowl- 
[ 144 ] 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

edge or power we may have possessed 
at school. 

Even though we find ourselves, how- 
ever, thus desperately remote from 
what other people expect us to be, we 
shall hardly differ among ourselves in 
gladness that we have had this pleasant 
interval between schooldays and life. 
Our gladness, too, will not be all be- 
cause of the gently human phases of 
our college years — the friendships and 
the memories deep-rooted in our hearts. 
We shall be glad as well of something 
less palpable, less definite, yet hardly 
less certain. After all, common sense 
is rarely wrong, except when it makes 
the mistake of trying rationally to ac- 
count for what it recognises. College, 
as common sense assures our whole 
country, is really worth while. Even 
though four years of college fail in 
general to make college men expert, 
[ 145 ] 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

they manage somehow to stimulate or, 
at worst, not to repress what powers 
of leadership those fortunate human 
beings may have been born with. I do 
not mean that your leaders of public 
opinion, great or small, need academic 
degrees or experience, nor that your 
college man will not everywhere find 
others than college men to measure 
himself with, abundantly worth all the 
mettle that is in him. But the fact re- 
mains, and we all believe it sure to 
remain through generations to come, 
that when you call the roll of your 
classmates, ten, twenty, or fifty years 
after a commencement day like this, 
you will find surprisingly few of them, 
when you compare them with groups 
of men collected otherwise, who have 
failed to sustain themselves to the 
best of their powers. To use a cant 
expression of the moment, your col- 
[ 146 ] 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

lege man is more than likely to make 
good. 

Partly, beyond question, this is a 
matter of the still strenuous process of 
selection by which he has emerged from 
the mass of his schoolfellows and con- 
temporaries. By no means everybody 
can sustain the initiatory test of en- 
trance examinations or the recurrent 
scrutinies of any college course, how- 
ever far from ideal in plan or in result. 
Partly, however, and to my mind far 
more profoundly, it seems due to a 
truth which all the disintegrating ten- 
dencies of modern education have as 
yet proved powerless to deny. Learn- 
ing, to be sure, has been divided and 
subdivided, specialised and subspecial- 
ised, until a modern college catalogue, 
with its bewildering announcement of 
courses and instructors, reminds one 
of nothing so much as of those intri- 
[ 147 ] 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

cately dissected pictures, innocent of 
guiding plan, which have lately proved 
alluring toys to grown-up children as 
well as to children pure and simple. 
Now learning, we should all agree, is 
not a toy; its analogy to these play- 
things, nevertheless, is more than super- 
ficial. What makes the pictures fas- 
cinating, tantalising if you will, is your 
certainty that each fragment, grotesque 
or rebellious though it may seem, 
really has its place in a scheme capable 
of reduction by intelligence to organ- 
ised unity. Something similar is true 
of what we study, and more or less 
learn, at college. Each separate bit of 
it is presented to us single, distinct, 
apart; yet each, we dumbly know, has 
its final relation to every other. Alone, or 
in company, or with guidance, we must 
busy ourselves to put the pieces together, 
if they are ever to have much meaning. 
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THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

Guidance, no doubt, is apt nowa- 
days to be rather blind. Our guides 
often seem more interested in contem- 
plating the outlines of their fragments 
than in trying to discover which will fit 
into which. None the less, I believe, 
your college man — and your college 
man, I mean, as distinguished not only 
from untrained men, but also from men 
whose training has been confined to 
technical schools — will rarely rest con- 
tent until he can begin to discern what 
belongs where. Even though our teach- 
ing apparently strive to satisfy us with 
the ideal of perceiving things apart, it 
is powerless to prevent our impulse — 
and indeed, purposely or not, it often 
serves rather to stimulate our impulse 
— toward thinking things together. 

If superlatives were not treacherous, 
I should be disposed to assert this power 
of thinking together things which other 
[ 149 ] 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

men can only perceive apart the chief 
good, the chief end and aim, the chief 
justification of a college career, for all 
men not destined to accept such a ca- 
reer as professional. As an example of 
what I have in mind, we may turn to 
two fields of study usually presented 
nowadays as distinct — the fields of his- 
tory and literature. Commonly, as we 
all know, they are taught and studied 
apart; and indeed, in certain aspects, 
they may perhaps be so studied most 
profitably. Otherwise, to go no further, 
there would be no reason for the exist- 
ence of two admirable societies, which 
I respected equally until one of them 
abandoned itself to the excesses of re- 
formed spelling— the American Histor- 
ical Association and the Modern Lan- 
guage Association of America. In point 
of fact, however, everybody is aware 
that literature can never be completely 
[ 150 ] 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

independent of historical conditions. 
Everything ever written, we must surely 
agree, was written at some definite time 
and in some definite place. History, 
we thus come to see, is the ultimate 
basis of all literature; just as all lit- 
erature might be described as the 
voice of history. 

Once begin thus to think of them to- 
gether, and you will find it hard to think 
them apart. Remember, for example, 
that Marlowe's " Tamburlaine " belongs 
to the period of the Spanish Armada; 
that Wordsworth and Shelley and Byron 
felt the spiritual upheaval of the French 
Revolution ; that the novels of Dickens 
came just after the Reform Bill; that 
Sidney Lanier was a devotedly loyal 
Confederate soldier. You will soon 
come to feel that these lasting poets and 
story-tellers could never have been what 
they were but for the tremendous his- 
[ 151 ] 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

torical forces which surged about them. 
Try next to think of those forces as 
voiceless: and you will find them in- 
stantly begin to lose something of the 
vitality which now makes them undy- 
ing. Or trace in imagination the career 
of Milton, until you can feel how the 
passionate aspiration of the English 
Puritans, dreaming that they could 
remould a nation in obedience to 
what they fervently believed the will 
of a Calvinistic God, exhausted itself 
through generations of mystical ecstasy 
and grim work, until only in his blind 
awakening to frustration of earthly 
hope the one great Puritan poet could 
finally breathe out the deathless lines 
of "Paradise Lost." History and lit- 
erature, we grow to see, may be known 
apart, minutely as you will; they can- 
not be understood, and neither can be- 
gin to approach the full significance of 
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THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

their mutual meaning, until we come to 
know them and to think of them inex- 
tricably and eternally together. 

Now, though no one would pretend 
that modern college men, as a class, 
are thus given to thinking history and 
literature together, there can be little 
doubt that college men are better able 
to do so, are more disposed to do so, 
and — if we take them by and large — 
are more likely to do so than men who 
have never had college training. His- 
tory and literature, too, we have consid- 
ered only as a single illustrative example 
of a general truth. Almost any other 
fields of learning might have served our 
purpose quite as well. What we now 
call the principles of evolution, for in- 
stance, first evident in such natural 
sciences as astronomy or biology, prove 
illuminating in economics, in literature, 
in the fine arts — throughout the whole 
[ 153 ] 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

baffling course of earthly progress from 
birth to death. Think of things to- 
gether and you will presently find each 
to signify more than it could ever sig- 
nify alone. Words themselves, the sym- 
bols of our thoughts, often seem, when 
we take them one by one, almost as 
meaningless as the letters which com- 
pose them for the eye. Put a few of them 
side by side, however, even as we are put- 
ting some together at this moment, and 
you will feel beyond dispute the magic 
power of composition. 

The good old days when college 
training was still based on Latin — the 
true universal language of European 
history and tradition — are not yet so 
far past but that we may all remember 
what that familiar word literally means. 
It signifies exactly what we have been 
trying to define in our minds — the 
process of putting together. If we thus 
[ 154 ] 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

agree to use it, for the moment, in its 
original sense, we may perhaps describe 
the most stimulating and the most en- 
during result of our college days as a 
strengthened power of composition. 
Your educated man has an inclination 
which may well grow into a yearning, 
even into a passion, for putting things, 
wherever he may find them, in the places 
where they best belong. To greater 
or less degree, he thereby becomes a 
composer of a philosophy. Your best 
philosophers, too, your wisest men, are 
those who compose at once most vigor- 
ously and most truly — with the least 
eccentricity and the most courage. The 
ideal end of such years as make up our 
college lives may be stated, indeed, 
as mastery of composition. 

Already you may perhaps feel that 
I am playing on the word. Whatever 
composition may literally mean, you 
[ 155 ] 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

might remind me, we use the word 
nowadays in a sense so definite that 
whoever attempts to use it otherwise 
comes near distortion of language. 
When any of us accustomed to Ameri- 
can schools or colleges during the last 
generation hear the word composition, 
it must first of all suggest a specific fact 
— namely, certain formal and by no 
means always fruitful courses of study, 
which more or less willingly we have 
been compelled to pursue. Beyond per- 
adventure it now associates itself prin- 
cipally with the ideas of words, of sen- 
tences, of paragraphs and the like — or, to 
use a cant phrase from the text-books, 
with the expression of thought and emo- 
tion in written words. This limitation 
of its meaning, too, is not the whole 
story. We are used to hearing of Latin 
composition, to be sure, of Greek com- 
position, of French and German, Italian 
[ 156 ] 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

and Spanish; you will find them all in 
any considerable announcement of col- 
lege studies throughout America. By 
itself, however, the word composition 
suggests no foreign language whatso- 
ever. The very fact that we speak of 
French composition, or of German, or 
of Italian, as a thing apart implies that 
each of them is different in our minds 
from all the others — individual, sepa- 
rate, distinct. By itself, the word com- 
position unquestionably suggests to 
most of us the expression of thought 
and feeling in the written words of our 
own native language. 

For our present purposes this acci- 
dent is not unhappy. Quite to under- 
stand any such generalisations as we are 
now attempting, nothing can help us 
more than to scrutinise some specific 
example of what we have in mind. 
Here is one at hand. What is true of 
[ 157 ] 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

composition in the broadest philosoph- 
ical sense — where it is concerned with 
thinking together the universe, from 
the systems of astronomy to the mole- 
cules of physics — ^is true, in principle, 
of composition, when applied to articu- 
late expression in words alone. 

In this aspect it has the momentary 
advantage of familiarity; for at least 
throughout the life-time of any man 
now or lately, in an American college, 
it has thus been devotedly studied from 
the Atlantic to the Pacific. There are 
various reasons, accordingly, why we 
may do well, during our little while 
here together, to dwell on it as an ex- 
ample of what college training can do 
for us nowadays. Insomuch, further- 
more, as this kind of illustration cannot 
be too specific, I shall ask no pardon for 
touching on it as it has come within my 
own observation at Harvard College. 
[ 158 ] 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

I shall only ask you to remember what 
I said a little while ago — ^that I am by 
no means authorised to speak in the 
name of Harvard, where opinions 
sometimes seem as numerous as pro- 
fessors; nor even in the slightest degree 
to implicate any of my immediate col- 
leagues, who are apt cordially to dis- 
agree not only with me, but with each 
other. What I say sets forth merely 
what one teacher has come to think and 
to believe concerning the study of liter- 
ary expression — the phase in which the 
study of composition has chanced to 
come chiefly within his experience. 

That experience is now considerable. 
Long before my time it was generally 
felt that Harvard men used their native 
language with little skill. The great 
and vital growth of Harvard during the 
forty years of President Eliot's admin- 
istration has been bound up with his 
[ 159 ] 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

belief that whoever does anything ill 
can be taught, and therefore ought to 
be taught, to do it well, or at least bet- 
ter. By the time when I was old enough 
to undertake responsible work, accord- 
ingly, the state of affairs at Harvard 
was peculiarly favourable to the study 
of literary composition, on the part of 
teachers and pupils alike. The need 
of it was acknowledged; the pursuit 
of it was encouraged; and the author- 
ities gave us every aid in their power. 
Thus a little company of us attacked 
our task, just as more and more of us 
have attacked it ever since; and statis- 
tically, so far as anybody could infer 
from the President's Reports, we have 
been pretty successful. Years ago the 
number of students who had submitted 
to our teaching began to be counted not 
by the hundred but by the thousand. 
Such an experience must stimulate any 
[ 160 ] 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

teacher to do his best in every way. 
We have all tried to. 

Now it happened that about 1890, 
one of my personal efforts to do my best 
under these circumstances resulted in an 
attempt to generalise more clearly and 
systematically than others had done the 
principles of the art which I was attempt- 
ing to teach. My consequent book, enti- 
tled "Enghsh Composition," embodied 
the results of ten years' experiment and 
thought. It was not particularly orig- 
inal, except that perhaps it collected 
and stated common material more in- 
telligibly and rather more readably 
than was then usual. It set forth that 
the qualities of a good style are Clear- 
ness, Force, and Elegance ; or, in other 
words, that whoever writes well ought 
to write so that you can understand 
him, so that he will not bore you, and 
so that he will please you. It set forth 

[ 161 ] 



\t 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

that literary composition — that is, the 
putting together of words in sentences, 
or of sentences in paragraphs, or of 
paragraphs in chapters, and so on — 
may be guided toward the qualities 
which it ought to exemplify by more or 
less conscious and habitual observance 
of three cardinal principles, to which I 
gave the names of Unity, of Mass or 
Emphasis, and of Coherence. To con- 
tinue the summary would be tedious. 
If the matter interest you the book sur- 
vives; if the matter leave you indiffer- 
ent, you may rest content that no hu- 
man being would ever dream of count- 
ing this little volume among the books 
which everybody ought to know. The 
surprising five-foot shelf of President 
Eliot might grow a hundred times as 
long without finding room for it. 

You may well wonder, accordingly, 
why I have had the temerity to trouble 
[ 162 ] 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

you with it at all. My reason is that in 
my own experience, which is for the mo- 
ment what I am trying to make clear, 
this not very important book has proved 
a landmark. It defines, as nothing less 
definite could define, a moment when, at 
least to me, the matter with which it 
deals looked doubly hopeful, in ways 
which the intervening nineteen years 
have disappointed. It expresses a state 
of gradually growing scholarship when 
one stops to generalise mostly for the 
sake of getting one's ideas in order, so 
that thereafter one may go on to gen- 
eralise, and to learn, more and more; 
and it implies, from beginning to end, 
unshaken faith in the all-sufficient effi- 
cacy of its doctrine. To put the matter 
more simply, it indicates hardly any 
doubt that if Harvard teachers should 
bravely proceed with the work they had 
begun, Harvard students would end by 
[ 163 ] 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

writing a great deal better than they 
have ever written yet. 

The book appeared nineteen years 
ago. If you will pardon my compla- 
cency in saying so, it has stood the test 
of time. At this moment, I mean, so 
long after it was written, it seems to me 
as true as it seemed to begin with ; and 
even my now ripened experience could 
make nothing much more useful for any 
who should desire my counsel about the 
matter it deals with. It disappoints me 
not for any positive reason; but only 
because nineteen laborious years have 
taught me so little more of the subject. 
In a general way, meanwhile, I have 
tried to keep aware of what other peo- 
ple have had to say about this matter 
of literary composition. The fact that 
I have come across nothing seriously 
to modify my views, or to alter my ex- 
pression of them, except in verbal de- 
[ 164 ] 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

tail, seems to me significant. Twenty 
years ago, composition, studied by it- 
self, appeared full of unforeseen possi- 
bilities; now, as a subject of study, it 
has come to seem exhaustible by a single 
and not very arduous effort. The only 
new idea I have lately had about it is 
at once slight and on the whole unwel- 
come to my colleagues. In brief, as a 
teacher, I have come to think that hon- 
est students are likely nowadays to 
blunder into more study of literary 
composition than is good for them. 
I am accordingly disposed to advise, as 
a matter of general economy, that, in a 
given college year, no student should 
be allowed to count toward any degree 
more than one course of instruction in 
composition, no matter what language 
such a course be concerned with. The 
true principles of composition, as I 
apprehend them, apply equally to every 

[ 165 1 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

language ever devised by man; the 
differences in this aspect, between an- 
cient languages and modern, and the 
differences of any languages — ancient or 
modern — among themselves, are mere 
accidents of idiom. So far as compo- 
sition goes, what you learn in one you 
may apply in all or any. My colleagues, 
however, seem unanimously disposed to 
hold this opinion mistaken. 

Taken by itself such reminiscence as 
I have indulged in may well appear triv- 
ially anecdotic. Taken in its relation to 
what we have had in mind before, how- 
ever, it has, I think, a fairly definite sig- 
nificance — namely, that the principles of 
composition, at least when concerned 
with matters of literary expression, can- 
not long be studied fruitfully by them- 
selves. The reason why is at once not 
far to seek, and on the whole illumi- 
nating ; for you will find it applicable 
[ 166 ] 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

to the process of composition in every 
imaginable phase. The very word 
composition, indeed, implies this rea- 
son why, studied by itself, the subject 
turns out to be sterile. When we 
study anything whatever by itself, we 
necessarily isolate it from everything 
else; in attending exclusively to com- 
position, accordingly, we begin un- 
wittingly to lose the habit, if we ever 
had one, of thinking it into relation 
with other matters. To put the case 
otherwise, paradoxically but almost 
exactly, over-concentrated attention to 
composition cannot help resulting in 
something like paralysis of power to 
compose. For if you have only one 
thing to put somewhere, you have noth- 
ing to put it together with. 

All this might not have been fatally 
disappointing, the nineteen-year while, 
if the result of our efforts to teach lit- 
[ 167 ] 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

erary composition at Harvard, however 
fraught with limitation for ourselves, 
had resulted in making Harvard stu- 
dents and Harvard graduates gener- 
ally write with unobtrusive but certain 
skill. One would never dream of de- 
manding from them incessant or even 
frequent literary creation. One might 
dare hope, however, that the faithfulness 
of our teaching and the regularity of 
their work — both of which I believe in- 
disputable — might ultimately establish 
something like a firm standard of ex- 
pression. Whether it has done so or 
not, I will leave you to judge. 

At this moment I have before me a 
little set of critical papers, lately submit- 
ted to me, after several weeks' notice, by 
an advanced class in literature. I will 
take from them a half-dozen sentences, 
literally at random. Here is the first on 
which my eye lights: **His songs are 
[ 168 1 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

known and remembered by all, they are 
recited in the district school, and read 
around the fireside of the rich and the 
cultured." Here is the next : "Though 
he may not prove in time to be the great- 
est of American authors or the most 
representative, he certainly will hold a 
prominent place in this epoch of our lit- 
erary history." The third to which I turn 
— they are all by different men — ^runs as 
follows : ** Born into a small printing es- 
tablishment, passing his boyhood among 
type fonts and the odor of printers' ink, 
engaging his young manhood in jour- 
nalistic pursuits, he paved the way for 
future editorship, and, above all, learned 
to know the value of copy." A shade 
more sense of composition here, perhaps ; 
but as to skill, we will not reason, but 
glance and pass. Our fourth example 
is less confused, and displays trace of 
intensity : "A French writer four years 
[ 169 ] 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

ago said that the only receipt for creat- 
ing interest in fiction nowadays is 'to 
smash the Ten Commandments,' but 
Lanier's genius shrank in moral recoil 
from the pollution of this desperate and 
devilish device." Fifthly comes the fol- 
lowing: "Puritanic sternness and se- 
verity characterise the homes of a peo- 
ple who for time immemorial have been 
noted for their gentleness and sweetness 
of temper, and the concord in their 
home-life." It is fair to explain that 
the writer of these impressive words 
was endeavouring to show that Dr. 
Mitchell misunderstands Eighteenth 
Century Philadelphia Quakers ; but we 
can hardly agree that the deserving 
young gentleman has made his point 
felicitously. Our sixth passage runs 
thus: "I take it that this very lack of 
appreciation of what we are and what 
we might be is the very fruitful source 
[ 170 ] 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

of both mobs and murders and graft in 
every sphere of our social galaxy." 

Now each of these six separate sen- 
tences from six different men is gram- 
matically tolerable. Each is sensible, or 
at least rational. Each implies a certain 
degree of literary appreciation. Only 
one, however, indicates deliberate effort 
to compose, — to put a word, or a clause, 
or a phrase, where it really belongs, — 
and that is the most obviously unskilful 
of the whole half-dozen. Yet all these 
men have studied composition, as a thing 
apart; two of them, if I am not mis- 
taken, have been held distinguished stu- 
dents thereof; and at least one of them 
has either taught the art, or proposed 
himself for the position of a teacher 
thereof. To use a technical term of 
my own, based on the fact that effective 
composition conscientiously or instinc- 
tively observes a few simple principles, a 
[ 171 ] 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

melancholy conclusion seems to follow : 
the present result of our heroic experi- 
ment to teach composition by itself is a 
general habit of style, among our pupils, 
best described by the word unprincipled. 
A curious example of what I have in 
mind has lately come to my notice in 
an interesting essay on Addison. The 
writer, though not, I believe, trained at 
Harvard, has certainly devoted faithful 
work elsewhere to the study and the 
teaching of composition, in which com- 
petent people have pronounced him 
expert; and there can be no question 
of his general culture and accomplish- 
ment. Yet, somehow, I found his 
essay tediously hard to read. A com- 
parison of one passage with the text 
which it attempted to paraphrase 
showed me — and I hope will show you 
— why. It runs thus : " Within the es- 
says, further divisions are made. The 
[ 172 1 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

beauties of the fourth book are consid- 
ered under three heads: 'pictures of 
still life . . . machines . . . the con- 
duct of Adam and Eve.' The tenth 
book is considered under four heads," 
and so on. Now that quoted passage 
is so far from Addisonian in effect that 
I could not help turning to the original 
to see what had been left out ; and here 
is what Addison wrote: "We may con- 
sider the beauties of the fourth book" — 
not, you may observe, "The beauties 
of the fourth book are considered" — 
"under three heads. In the first are 
those pictures of still life which we 
meet with in the descriptions of Eden, 
Paradise, Adam's Bower, etc. In the 
next are the machines, which compre- 
hend the speeches and behaviour of the 
good and bad angels. In the last is the 
conduct of Adam and Eve who are the 
principal actors in the poem." — So far 
[ 173 ] 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

Mr. Addison. In the matter of sum- 
mary, we may agree, his critic was 
accurate. The summary, however, no 
more gives the sense of the original 
than if the original had never gladdened 
the critic's eye. His eye I say inten- 
tionally; his hearing, I am told, is nor- 
mal. From his method of expression, 
you might rationally have supposed 
him to have learned the arts of reading 
and of writing in an asylum for the 
Deaf and Dumb. 

The wonder of it is that any one 
could write so insensitively who has 
long been under the influence of Addi- 
son — that any one could prove so su- 
premely immune from literary con- 
tagion. Something beyond the frailty 
of human nature seems needful, to 
account for such robustness of resist- 
ance. Twenty or thirty years ago I 
should have attributed this callousness 
[174 ] 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

to lack of training; I should unhesita- 
tingly have prescribed course after 
course in English composition, much as 
grimly spectacled resident physicians 
in France or Germany bid you take 
bath after bath, and come back for 
more next year. Now, sadder if not 
wiser, I am rather disposed to wonder 
whether one chief difference between 
Addison and his critic may not be 
found in the simple fact that of two 
sensible human beings, both at the 
moments of their writing normally free 
from inspiration, the one had never 
studied English composition as a thing 
apart, and the other had so long studied 
and taught it as a thing apart that he 
had grown fatally unable to associate 
it in practice with anything else what- 
soever. In that event, every new course 
of composition, given or taken, would 
probably aggravate his malady, or in- 
[ 175 ] 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

crease his robustness of resistance, as 
you prefer. The tonic prescription 
would not be to study composition; it 
would be to compose. 

For even though the study and the 
practice of composition, or of expres- 
sion, as a thing apart generally prove 
unprofitable, nothing can avoid the fact 
that, if we are to grow into more knowl-^ 
edge and wisdom, it must be by some 
process of putting together things which 
belong together yet occur apart. Of 
such affinities, incessantly separate yet 
insistently demanding union, none is 
more teasingly constant than that which 
makes thought demand expression and 
expression demand thought. There is 
need, we saw a little while ago, even of 
history to understand literature, and of 
literature to understand history. There 
is more insistent need still of words if 
we would ever know the slightest shred 
[ 176 ] 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

of either history or literature — apart or 
together. Nothing but words, duly com- 
posed, can ever tell us anything what- 
ever about either of them. If in turn 
we would ever tell others anything about 
them, we must ourselves have recourse 
chiefly and strenuously to words. What 
thus turns out to be the case, too, con- 
cerning history and literature, is equally 
the case when we come to deal with the 
myriad other facts which we must put 
together, first for ourselves, and then for 
others, if our thought and our utterance 
in this world are to have any semblance 
of intellectual meaning. So far as we 
are alive and mean to make our hves 
dynamic, we must incessantly and cour- 
ageously compose, in vastly various, 
vastly changing, always experimental, 
bravely vital ways. 

Now it is quite possible that, after all 
my years of attempt to practise the doc- 
[ 177 ] 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

trine I am trying to expound, I may 
seem here to have asserted that, al- 
though the study of composition is of 
prime importance, there is really no use 
in studying the subject at all. If I have 
produced any such paradoxical impres- 
sion, I have blundered sadly. What has 
truly been in my mind is not that our 
courageous experiments in the teaching 
and the study of composition as a 
thing apart have been fruitless; it is 
rather that they have led to unfore- 
seen conclusions. They have not yet 
demonstrated, to be sure, that compo- 
sition cannot be fruitfully studied all 
alone; but they have gone so far to- 
ward such demonstration, I believe, 
that every bit of them will in due 
time thus be justified. It took al- 
chemy to make chemistry; there is 
no reason to repine for any amount 
of experiment which may finally show 
[ 178 ] 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

us how to do truly constructive work 
in composition. 

Just what form this constructive work 
may take no one can surely prophesy. 
The problem involved in it is not soli- 
tary. Something like it seems evident 
everywhere throughout the range of 
modern education, which has discarded 
its old formulas and has not yet re- 
placed them by valid substitutes. Not 
very long ago I touched on this gen- 
eral matter, in an address of which the 
subject was the Mystery of Education. 
To detail the substance of this discus- 
sion would be needless here. One phase 
of it, however, I may briefly recount, for 
it will help us, I think, to see how the 
study of composition and of expression 
may in time profitably be pursued ; and, 
in pointing this out, I shall perhaps make 
clearer than at first the broad general- 
isations on which I begin to base it. 
[ 179 ] 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

For the instant, I shall therefore ask 
you to forget what we have hitherto 
been considering and to inquire only 
what man is and where — man, the 
agent and the patient of all educational 
processes whatsoever. In the universe, 
in this world, in history, in time, in 
space, he is surrounded by a surgently 
moving environment to which we may 
give the name of force. Force is about 
him everywhere, incessantly and infi- 
nitely altering the conditions which 
seem least mutable. Here and now, 
for example, we have been together only 
for what seem a few every-day minutes. 
Yet even as I have uttered these words, 
some instant of time has flitted from 
the impenetrable future to the irrevo- 
cable past. The sun at this instant 
lights the world from another angle 
than that from whence his light came 
when we entered on this discussion. 

[ 180 ] 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

The stars have moved somewhither in 
their courses; and men have died ; and 
men-children have come into being; 
and all the mystery about us, eternally 
the same, has undergone some aspect 
of its eternal change. In this universe 
of stirring force man finds himself 
conscious. His task is as best he may 
to adapt himself to his environment of 
incessant change, and of change which 
in our time is swiftly and surely accel- 
erating its historic rate of mutation. 

Man's adaptation of himself to this 
environment of force I have ventured 
to liken to the office of a lens, which 
duly placed can accumulate and diffuse 
or concentrate rays of light. A con- 
scious, flexible, animate focus of force, 
we may call man, surrounded by sur- 
gent rays or streams of that same force, 
sweeping him onward from past to fut- 
ure, yet swirling onward themselves, all 
[ 181 ] 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

the while, at a rate increasingly beyond 
that at which they impel his little, 
flashing, mortal self. Somehow he can 
gather together a few of these rays or 
streams of force so vastly unimprisoned 
around him; and among the rays or 
streams which he can momentarily 
accumulate, in part, are those which 
we name science and history and liter- 
ature. One phase of his focal task is 
to compose them, to fuse them. The 
other phase of it, and not the less wor- 
thy, is that on which we have been 
dwelling together here — the expression 
of that fusion in such manner as shall 
convey the full and living vitality of it 
to others than himself. To help us in 
this effort is the true purpose of the 
study of composition, a study which, if 
we pursue it aright, may well be held 
among the noblest of the ends and 
aims of earnest life. 

[ 182 ] 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

Once assured that composition, even 
in words alone, deserves our loving 
care, we may accordingly find stimulus 
rather than discouragement in the fact 
that the principles of it are marvel- 
lously simple. The best workmen, they 
tell us, are those who need the fewest 
tools. The secret of skill is not knowl- 
edge but practice. Practice alone, I 
sometimes think, is better a hundred- 
fold than knowledge alone; and prac- 
tice hampered by conscious knowledge 
is halting enough at best; but practice 
guided by knowledge so mastered that 
the teachings of knowledge have be- 
come instinctive will bring us as near 
as the limitations of our earthly life 
can permit to the Divine ideal of per- 
fection. 

If these considerations have not 
been all wrong, we can now begin to 
perceive why, in the past, the study of 
[ 183 ] 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

composition, and of expression, has 
been so far from satisfactory. The 
trouble has sprung from the fact that 
composition has generally been studied 
as if it were an empty abstraction, to be 
considered and used apart, to be laid 
aside when we have to do with other 
matters than itself. Thus we have 
come to consider it as something, like 
its own principles, which can be mas- 
tered once for all, and then contentedly 
forgotten. Instead, I hope we may now 
see, the very essence of its being lies in 
the truth that it must incessantly con- 
cern all things and all of us. Apprehen- 
sion of its principles is well worth while, 
but only in so far as these principles 
shall serve us as guides in careers 
of unflinching and unremittent study. 
Our focal task, when we would duly 
express the rays of force collected and 
composed within our conscious selves, 
[ 184 ] 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

is unendingly and stimulatingly ex- 
perimental. It is to find our words 
and our phrases — to put together our 
dead symbols of living thought and 
emotion — until, as our need may be, 
they shall diffuse our meaning through- 
out the present and the future, or shall 
burn it deep in the one heart which we 
yearn to make responsive to our own. 
All of which, I dare say, sounds too 
vague to have much meaning. Trans- 
lated into every-day terms, you will find 
it to signify that Mr. Addison, for ex- 
ample, never penned a line without 
penning it as well as he could, consid- 
ering at one and the same time what he 
had to say and whom he had to say it to ; 
but that the critic of Mr. Addison, 
having duly considered at other times 
and places how things ought to be 
written on general principles, contented 
himself in this instance with the mere 
[ 185 ] 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

act of penning, serenely regardless of 
how well he wrote, or of who might 
have the trouble of trying to make out 
what he meant. It is not Addison's 
positive style which is so admirable; it 
is the fact that throughout his work 
you can feel the masterly touch of one 
who composes not only his words and 
sentences, but all his powers, in the 
full though not sonorous harmony 
which has made him gently enduring. 

That he writes with a grace and 
ease no longer quite the fashion is evi- 
dently true. So is the fact that this 
beautiful urbanity is a positively delight- 
ful quality. The final merit of his style, 
however, lies in nothing formal, but in 
the completeness of its adaptation to 
his meaning and his purpose. Captious 
temper, indeed, might sometimes won- 
der whether Addison's adaptation of 
his style to his concepts were not a 
[ 186 ] 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

shade too fine, whether in admiration 
of its fineness a reader might not find at- 
tention distracted from the significance 
of the words to the words themselves. 
For my own part, I have rarely if ever 
found this the case. To me, accord- 
ingly, the Spectator — ^like Gulliver, or 
Othello, or Macaulay's Essay on Lord 
Clive, or the Newcomes — seems alto- 
gether admirable. The style of a mas- 
terpiece is excellent just because it never 
obtrudes itself between a reader and the 
meaning which it radiantly expresses. 
A comparison with not quite masterly 
works of eminent literature may define 
what I mean. One decisive reason 
why eccentric writing, like Carlyle's, 
or Browning's, or Walt Whitman's, or 
George Meredith's, wonderful though 
it be, can never command unqualified 
admiration is to be found in the un- 
happy fact that any obviously unusual 
[ 187 ] 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

style interposes itself between our wits 
and the meaning which we are trying to 
apprehend. The ideal of expression is 
a momentary fusion of what the writer 
means with what the reader thinks and 
feels. Any grace, any ingenuity of style 
favourable to this end, is a merit. Any 
which distracts attention to itself is a 
blemish. Composition, to revert to the 
word with which we have been playing 
so long, should ideally be complete — 
fusing the knowledge, the character, 
the temper, the words of the writer or 
speaker with the attention and the full 
receptive power of readers and hearers. 
Again we may seem to be losing our- 
selves in abstraction. To illustrate 
what I have in mind I may recall the 
story of a lawyer in his time eminent at 
the New England Bar. He was not a 
brilliant man, as I remember him, nor 
remarkable for profound learning or 
[ 188 ] 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

exceptional power of intellect. His 
fundamental quality was honest, robust, 
and cheerful good sense. His profes- 
sional achievement took the form of 
the frequent winning of doubtful cases, 
against adversaries whom off-hand you 
might have thought stronger than he. 
When asked once how he had man- 
aged to secure an unexpected verdict 
in spite of alertly able opposition, he 
answered very simply that it was by 
observing a rule taught him by experi- 
ence. To impress a judge or a jury, 
he opined, you must hold their attention; 
and no one can hold it very long. When 
you rise to address them, accordingly, 
with the advantage of a novelty sure to 
attract it for the moment, you will do 
well to state your case while they are 
still attending to you. Then develop 
it as fully as they will let you. When 
their attention begins to wander, the 
[ 189 ] 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

fault is not theirs, but yours; so never 
hesitate to bring your remarks to a 
close, no matter how much more you 
may have left to say. All the rest 
would be worse than a waste of words 
and time; it would be a bore; and no 
matter how just your judge, nor how 
honest your jury, human beings cannot 
help a little resentment against any 
fellow-creature who has bored them. 

A colleague of mine at Harvard, who 
knew this old lawyer well, professes 
that he has applied the good man's 
principles to college lectures. If stu- 
dents do not follow a lecture, they 
learn nothing from it. If in a given 
class-room, the attention of many is 
obviously wandering from the matter 
in hand, the fault is not theirs, but the 
lecturer's. Very good. In such cir- 
cumstances, my colleague declares, he 
attempts to regain the attention of his 
[ 190 ] 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

pupils. If he succeeds, the lecture goes 
on. If he fails, he does not hesitate to 
dismiss his class, sadly admitting him- 
self unable for the hapless moment so to 
compose what he has to say as to put 
it in contact with the wits of his hearers. 
For composition, in its broadest 
meaning, implies something more than 
the tendency generally encouraged by 
the experience of college life — the life 
from which you are just emerging; the 
life which long ago made us elders 
something else than we should have 
been without it. Thereby, each in his 
degree, we have started on what should 
be our life-long task of thinking things 
together. This primal phase of com- 
position is perhaps its most profound. 
Without the added vitality of articulate 
expression, however, it can come to 
little. We must compose in words the 
fusion of thought and emotion taught 
[ 191 ] 



THE STUDY OP EXPRESSION 

us by learning and experience; and we 
must not rest content with the mere fact 
of expression until, so far as in us lies, 
what we are trying to express has been 
placed as close as we can place it to 
the thought and emotion of those others 
than ourselves whom we make effort 
to inform, to influence, to check, to 
guide, to inspire. One expresses best 
when one says what one means, when 
one holds attention, and when — ^what- 
ever one's faults or infirmities — one 
rather attracts than repels the sympa- 
thy of those who attend. 

Mastery of expression throughout is 
the ideal which we have striven to keep 
in mind; and there is hardly need to 
recall how the whole record of human 
history shows us few unchallenged 
masters of anything. So as I have 
spoken here to-day, you may well have 
felt an ironical contrast between the 
[ 192 ] 



THE STUDY OP EXPRESSION 

somewhat elusive thoughts which I have 
attempted to imprison in words and the 
none too feUeitous words themselves. 
If you will let yourselves feel, however, 
the earnestness of my effort not to 
waste the hour which your kindness has 
let us pass together, I venture to hope 
that it will linger happily in your mem- 
ories, as it surely will linger in mine. 
For throughout it there has hovered 
around us one truth in which we all 
agree. The chief end of life, we may 
sometimes come to feel, is to put to- 
gether and to bind together what with- 
out us might stay forever separate. 
There could hardly be a more gracious 
act to this end than the friendly invita- 
tion which has brought me to meet you 
here. Vague though my response to it 
may perhaps have seemed, I shall there- 
fore trust you to understand that I have 
tried to do my responsive part of friend- 
[ 193 ] 



THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION 

ship— the friendship now so happily 
binding together your college and mine, 
your State and mine, your future and 
mine, in the happy concord of our 
common country. 



[ 194 ] 



EDGAE ALLAN POE 

An Address during the Poe Centenary at the 
University of Virginia, 19 January, 1909. 

First printed in " The Book of the Poe Centenary." 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

Mr. President, Ladies and Gen- 
tlemen : 
On the 19th of January, 1809, Edgar 
Allan Poe was born in Boston. The 
fact, to be sure, has been disputed; 
for the scanty and defective vital 
records of that period make no men- 
tion of it. It remains, however, cer- 
tain. Almost exactly a hundred years 
later, my friend, Mr. Walter Watkins, 
impelled by occasional statements that 
Poe was born elsewhere, collected, 
from the Boston newspapers of 1808 
and 1809, notices of all the plays in 
which the parents of Poe appeared 
[ 197 ] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

during that season. These demon- 
strate that Mrs. Poe withdrew from the 
stage about Christmas time, 1808, and 
reappeared only on February 9th, 1809, 
when one of the newspapers congrat- 
ulated her on her happy recovery from 
her confinement. This is apparently 
the most nearly contemporary record of 
Poe's birth. The researches of Mr. 
Watkins did not end here. All record 
of Poe's birthplace was supposed to have 
been lost; and indeed there is little 
likelihood that Poe himself ever knew 
just where it was. By examining the 
tax lists for 1808 and 1809, Mr. Wat- 
kins discovered that David Poe, the 
father of the poet, was taxed that year 
as resident in a house owned by one 
Henry Haviland, who had bought the 
property, a few years before, from a 
Mr. Haskins — a kinsman, I believe, of 
the mother of Ralph Waldo Emerson. 
[ 198 ] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

The house was pulled down some fifty 
years ago, but Mr. Watkins has ascer- 
tained from the records that it was 
situated at what is now No. 62 Carver 
Street. In 1809, this was a respectable, 
though not a fashionable, part of the 
city. There Poe was born. 

The circumstances of his career 
were restless; on the whole, they were 
solitary. Throughout his forty years 
of mortal sunlight and shadow he was 
never quite i^ accord with his sur- 
roundings. He was never tried by 
either of the tests for which ambition 
chiefly longs — the gravely happy test of 
wide responsibility, or the stimulatingly 
happy test of dominant success. Troub- 
lous from beginning to end his earthly 
life seems; to him this world could 
not often have smiled contagiously 
sympathetic. So much is clear; and 
a little more is clear as well. When he 
[ 199 ] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

sought sympathy, or found semblance 
of it, and thus for a httle while could 
feel trouble assuaged, he could find it 
most nearly among those generous 
phases of Southern spirit which sur- 
rounded the happier years of his youth. 
There was little trace of it, for him, in 
the still half-Puritan atmosphere of that 
New England where he chanced, a 
stranger, to see the light. 

So it was with deep and reverent 
sense of your Southern generosity that 
I received your grave and friendly 
summons to join with you here and 
now. Here, in this sanctuary of Vir- 
ginia tradition, you have not scrupled 
to call me from the heart of New Eng- 
land, to pay tribute not only for myself, 
and for my own people, but tribute in 
the name of us all, to the memory of 
Poe. If one could only feel sure of per- 
forming such a task worthily, no task, 

[ 200 ] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

of duty or of privilege, could be more 
solemnly happy. For none could more 
wonderfully imply how Virginians and 
the people of New England — each still 
themselves — have so outlived their long 
spiritual misunderstandings of one an- 
other that with all our hearts we can 
gladly join together, as fellow country- 
men, in celebrating the memory of one 
recognised everywhere as the fellow- 
countryman of us all. 

Everywhere is a nowise hyperbolic 
word to describe the extent of Poe's 
constantly extending fame, sixty years 
after they laid him in his grave. His 
name is not only eminent in the literary 
history of Virginia, or of New York, or 
of America; it has proved itself among 
the very few of those native to America 
which have commanded and have jus- 
tified admiration throughout the civil- 
ised world. Even this does not tell 
[ 201 ] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

the whole story. So far as we can now 
discern, he has securely risen above 
the mists of time and the fogs of acci- 
dent. His work may appeal to you or 
leave you deaf; you may adulate it or 
scrutinise it, as you will; you may dis- 
pute as long and as fruitlessly as you 
please concerning its positive signifi- 
cance or the magnitude of its greatness. 
The one thing which you cannot do — 
the thing for which the moment is for- 
ever past — is to neglect it. Forever 
past, as well, all loyal Americans must 
gladly find the moment — if indeed 
there ever was a moment — when any 
of us could even for an instant regret it. 
There is no longer room for any manner 
of question that the writings of Poe are 
among the still few claims which Amer- 
ica can as yet urge unchallenged in 
proof that our country has enriched 
permanent literature. Even with no 
[ 202 ] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

other reason than this, loyal .Americans 
must already unite in cherishing his 
memory. 

So true, so obvious, this must seem 
to-day that we are prone, in accepting 
it, to forget the marvel of it, as we for- 
get the marvels of Nature — of sunrise, 
of sleep, of birth, of memory itself. 
The marvel of it, in truth, is none the 
less reverend because, like these, we 
need never find it miraculous. Hap- 
pily for us all — ^happily for all the 
world — ^Poe is not an isolated, sporadic 
phenomenon in our national history. 
He was an American of the Nineteenth 
Century. If we ponder never so little 
on those commonplace words, we shall 
find them charged with stirring truth. 
To summarise the life of any nation, 
there is no better way than to turn to 
the successive centuries of its history, 
and to ask yourself, with no delay of 
[ 203 ] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

slow or painful study, what names and 
what memories, unborn at the begin- 
ning of these epochs, were in perpetual 
existence when they ended. When we 
thus consider our United States of 
America, the spiritual splendour of the 
Nineteenth Century glows amazing. 

That Nineteenth Century, as we all 
gravely know, was by no means a 
period of national concord. Rather, 
far and wide, it was a period when the 
old order was fatally passing, yielding 
place to new. Thus inevitably, through- 
out our country, it was a period of hon- 
est and noble passion running to the 
inspiring height of spiritual tragedy. 
For no tragedy can be more superbly 
inspiring than that of epochs when 
earnestly devoted human beings, spir- 
itually at one in loyalty to what they 
believe the changeless ideals of truth 
and of righteousness, are torn asunder 
[ 204 ] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

by outbreaks of such tremendous his- 
toric forces as make the mechanical 
forces of Nature seem only thin para- 
bles, imaging the vaster forces still 
which we vainly fancy to be immaterial. 
It is not until times like these begin to 
fade and subside into the irrevocable 
certainty of the past that we can begin 
to perceive the essential unity of their 
grandeur. Nothing less than such su- 
preme ordeal of conflict can finally 
prove the quality and the measure of 
heroes; and in the stress and strain, no 
human vision can truly discern them 
all ; but once proved deathless, the 
heroes stand side by side, immortally 
brethren. So, by and by, we come 
wondrously to perceive that we may 
honour our own heroes most worthily 
— most in the spirit which they truly 
embodied; most, I believe, as they 
themselves would finally bid us, if our 
[ 205 ] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

ears could still catch the accents of 
their voices — when we honour with 
them their brethren who, in the passing 
years of passion, seemed for a while 
their foes. 

When we of America thus contem- 
plate the Nineteenth Century, we can- 
not fail to rejoice in the memories it 
has left us. They are so many, so full 
of inspiration, so various in all but the 
steadfastness with which they with- 
stand the deadening test of the years, 
that it would be distracting, and even 
invidious, to call the roll of our wor- 
thies at a moment like this. What 
more truly and deeply concerns us is 
an evident historical fact, generally 
true of all the human careers on which 
our heroic memories of the Nineteenth 
Century rest unshaken. Among those 
careers almost all — North and South, 
East and West — won, in their own 
[ 206 ] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

time, distinguished public recognition. 
What I have in mind we may best 
realise, perhaps, if for a moment we 
imagine ourselves in some Nineteenth 
Century congregation of our country- 
men, similar to this where we are gath- 
ered together. Fancy, for instance, 
the companies assembled to welcome 
Lafayette, far and wide, during his last 
visit to our nation which he had helped 
call into being. Among the American 
dignitaries then in their maturity, and 
still remembered by others than their 
own descendants, almost every one 
would already have been well and 
widely known. A local stranger in any 
such assemblage, to whom his host 
should point out the more distinguished 
personages there present, would gener- 
ally have found their names not only 
memorable but familiar, just as we 
should find them still. What would 
[ 207 ] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

thus have been the ease in 1824 would 
have stayed so, too, five and twenty 
years later. The heroes of our olden 
time were mostly gladdened by the 
consciousness of recognised and ac- 
knowledged eminence. 

Now, in contrast with them, let us 
try to imagine a figure which might 
perhaps have attracted the eye in some 
such American assemblage sixty-five 
years ago. Glancing about, you might 
very likely have observed a slight, 
alert man, with rather lank, dark hair, 
and deep, restless eyes. His aspect 
might hauntingly have attracted you, 
and set you to wondering whether he 
was young or old. On the whole you 
might probably have felt that he looked 
distrustful, defiant if not almost repel- 
lent, certainly not ingratiating or en- 
gagingly sympathetic. Yet there would 
have hovered about him an impalpable 
[ 208 ] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

atmosphere of fascination, which would 
have attracted your gaze back to him 
again and again; and each new scru- 
tiny would have increased your impres- 
sion that here was some one solitary, 
apart, not to be confused with the rest. 
He would hardly have been among the 
more notable personages, on the plat- 
form or at the high table. You might 
well have wondered whether anybody 
could tell you his name; and if, in 
answer to a question, your neighbour 
had believed that this was Edgar Allan 
Poe, you might very probably have 
thought the name unimportant. You 
would, perhaps, have had a general 
impression that he had written for a 
good many magazines, and the like, — 
that he had produced stories, and 
verses, and criticism, — but the chances 
are that you would not clearly have 
distinguished him unless as one of that 
[ 209 ] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

aflSuent company of literati who illus- 
trated the '40 's, and who are remem- 
bered now only because their names 
occur in essays preserved among Poe's 
collected works. Almost certainly he 
would hardly have impressed you as 
memorable. His rather inconspicuous 
solitude would not have seemed re- 
markable. Very likely, if you were a 
stranger thereabouts, you would have 
paid little more attention to his pres- 
ence, but would rather have proceeded 
to inquire who else, of more solid 
quality, was then and there worth 
looking at. 

All this might well have happened 
little more than sixty years ago ; and 
though to some of us sixty years may 
still seem to stretch long, they are far 
from transcending the period of hu- 
man memory. It would be by no 
means extraordinary if in this very com- 
[ 210 ] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

pany, here present, there were some 
who can remember the year 1845, or 
the election of President Taylor. Be- 
yond question, every one of us has 
known, with something like contem- 
porary intimacy, friends and relatives, 
only a little older than ourselves in 
seeming, to whom those years re- 
mained as vivid as you and I shall find 
the administration of President Roose- 
velt. That olden time, in fact, when 
amid such congregations as this, any- 
where throughout America, the pres- 
ence of Poe would hardly have been 
observed, has not quite faded from 
living recollection. At this moment, 
nevertheless, there is no need to explain 
anywhere why we are come together 
here, from far and wide, to honour his 
memory. Not only all of us here as- 
sembled, not only all Virginia, and all 
New York, and all New England, and 
[ 211 ] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

all our American countrymen beside, 
but the whole civilised world would in- 
stantly and eagerly recognise the cer- 
tainty of his eminence. What he was, 
while still enmeshed in the perplexity 
of earthly circumstance, is already a 
matter of little else than idle curiosity. 
What he is admits of no dispute. So 
long as the name of America shall 
endure, the name of Poe will persist, 
in serene certainty, among those of our 
approved national worthies. 

In all our history, I believe, there is 
no more salient contrast than this be- 
tween the man in life and his immortal 
spirit. Just how or when the change 
came to be we need not trouble our- 
selves to dispute. It is enough for us, 
during this little while when we are to- 
gether, that we let our thoughts dwell 
not on the Poe who was but on the 
Poe who is. Even then we shall do 
[ 212 ] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

best not to lose ourselves in conjec- 
tures concerning his positive magni- 
tude, or his ultimate significance, when 
you measure his utterances with what 
we conceive to be absolute truth, or 
with the scheme of the eternities. We 
should be content if we can begin to 
assure ourselves of what he is, and 
of why. 

The Poe whom we are met to cele- 
brate is not the man, but his work. 
Furthermore, it is by no means all the 
work collected in those volumes where 
studious people can now trace, with 
what edification may ensue, the history, 
the progress, the ebb and the flow of 
his copious literary production. His 
extensive criticism need not detain or 
distract us ; it is mostly concerned 
with ephemeral matters, forgotten ever 
since the years when it was written. 
His philosophical excursions, fantas- 
[ 213 ] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

tic or pregnant as the case may finally 
prove to be, we need hardly notice. The 
same is true concerning his copious 
exposition of literary principle, super- 
ficially grave, certainly ingenious, per- 
haps earnest, perhaps impishly fantas- 
tic. All of these, and more too, would 
inevitably force themselves on our con- 
sideration if we were attempting to re- 
vive the Poe who was. At this mo- 
ment, however, we may neglect them as 
serenely as we may neglect scrutiny of 
outward and visible signs, of such ques- 
tions as those of where he lived and 
when and for how long, of what he did 
in his private life, of whom he made 
love to and what he ate for dinner, of 
who cut his waistcoats, and of how — if 
at all — he paid for them. 

The very suggestion of such details 
may well and truly seem beneath the 
dignity of this moment. They are 
[ 2U ] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

forced into conscious recognition, not 
by any tinge of inherent value, but be- 
cause of the innocently intrusive ped- 
antry now seemingly inseparable from 
the ideal of scholarship. We have 
passed, for the while, beyond the tyr- 
anny of that scholarly mood which used 
to exahust its energy in analysis of 
every word and syllable throughout the 
range of literature. From sheer reac- 
tion, I sometimes think, we are apt 
nowadays, when concerned with litera- 
ture, to pass our time, even less fruitfully 
than if we were still grammarians, in 
researches little removed from the im- 
pertinence of gossip; and gossip con- 
cerning memorable men and women is 
only a shade less futile than gossip 
concerning the ephemeral beings who 
flit across our daily vision. So far as 
it can keep us awake from supersti- 
tious acceptance of superhuman myth, 
[ 215 ] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

it may perhaps have its own little salu- 
tary function. If it distract us from 
such moods of deeper sympathy as 
start the vagrant fancies of myth-mak- 
ers, it does mischief as misleading as 
any ever wrought by formal pedantry, 
and without the lingering grace of tra- 
ditional dignity. Your truly sound 
scholarship is concerned rather with 
such questions as we are properly 
concerned with here and now. Its 
highest hope, in literary matters, is to 
assert and to maintain persistent facts 
in their permanent values. In the case 
of Poe, for example, its chief questions 
are first of what from among his copi- 
ous and varied work has incontestably 
survived the conditions of his human 
environment, and secondly of why this 
survival has occurred. What contri- 
bution did Poe make to lasting liter- 
ature.? Does this justly belong to the 
[ 216 ] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

literature not only of America but of 
the world ? In brief, why is he so 
memorable as we all acknowledge by 
our presenc-e here to-day ? 

Stated thus, these questions are not 
very hard to answer. The Poe of liter- 
ature is the writer of a good many tales, 
or short stories, and of a few intensely 
individual, though not deeply confiden- 
tial, poems. Stories and poems alike 
stand apart not only from all others in 
the literature of America, but — I be- 
lieve we may agree — from any others 
anywhere. Some profoundly, some 
rather more superficially, they all pos- 
sess, in their due degree, an impalpable 
quality which the most subtle of us 
might well be at pains to define, but 
which the most insensitive man imag- 
inable can always, surely, recurrently 
feel. The most remarkable phase of 
the impression they thus make is prob- 
[ 217 ] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

ably the complete and absolute cer- 
tainty of its recurrence. Turn, when- 
ever you will and in whatever mood, to 
any of Poe's work which has proved 
more than ephemeral. Tale or poem, 
it may chance either to appeal to you 
or to repel you. In one mood you may 
think it inspired; in another, you may 
find it little better than prankishly arti- 
ficial. You may praise it until dissent 
gape breathless at your superlatives; 
or you may relentlessly point out what 
you are pleased to believe its limita- 
tions, its artificialities, its patent de- 
fects. Even then, a very simple question 
must bring you to pause. Let anybody 
ask you what this piece of literature is 
like, or what is like it — ^let anybody 
ask with what we should match it. 
Whether you love it or are tempted to 
disdain it, you must be forced to the 
admission that it is almost unique. 
[ 218 ] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

Whatever its ultimate significance, the 
better work of Poe remains altogether 
itself, and therefore altogether his. 
This gleams the more vividly when 
you come to recognise how his indi- 
viduality asserts itself to you, whatever 
your own passing mood, under all 
imaginable conditions. The utterance 
of Poe is as incontestably, as trium- 
phantly itself as is the note of a song 
bird — as poets abroad have found the 
music of the skylark, or of the nightin- 
gale, or as our own country-folk find 
the call of the whippoorwill echoing 
through the twilight of American woods. 
His individuality, the while, is of a 
kind for which our language hardly 
affords a name more exact than the 
name poetic. The accident that we 
are generally accustomed to confuse 
the spirit of poetry with some common 
features of poetic structure can mis- 

[ 219 ] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

lead us only for a moment. Poetry is 
not essentially a matter of rhyme or 
metre, of measure and quantity in 
sound or syllable. The essence of it is 
not material but spiritual. There are 
few more comprehensive descriptions 
of it than the most familiar in the 
varied range of English literature: 

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet 

Are of imagination all compact: — 

One sees more devils than vast Hell can hold, — 

That is, the madman; the lover, all as frantic, 

Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt; 

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling. 

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth 

to heaven; 
And, as imagination bodies forth 
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen 
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing 
A local habitation and a name. 

In the literature of America, and 
indeed throughout that of the English 
language, you will be at pains to point 
[ 220 ] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

out utterances more illustrative of these 
lines— I had almost said more definitive 
of them — than you shall find in the tales 
and the poems of Poe at their surviving 
best. Momentarily illusory though his 
concrete touches may sometimes make 
his tales — and he possessed, to a rare 
degree, the power of arousing *'that 
willing suspension of disbelief for the 
moment which constitutes poetic faith" 
— the substance of his enduring fan- 
tasies may always be reduced to the 
forms of things unknown, bodied forth 
by sheer power of imagination. To 
these airy nothings the cunning of his 
pen, turning them to shapes, gives local 
habitations and names so distinct and 
so vivid that now and again you must 
be loath to believe them, in final anal- 
ysis, substantially unreal. Yet unreal 
they always prove at last, phantas- 
mally and hauntingly immaterial. They 
[ 221 ] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

are like figured tapestries spun and 
woven, warp and woof, from such stuff 
as dreams are made of. Only the 
dreams are not quite our own. The 
dreamer who has dreamed them is the 
poet who has woven them into this fab- 
ric, making them now forever ours as 
well as his. Without his own inner- 
most life they could never have come 
into being at all. Without his con- 
summate craftsmanship, itself almost 
a miracle, they must have hovered in- 
visibly beyond the range of all other 
consciousness than his who dreamed 
them. Dreamer and craftsman alike, 
and supreme, it is he, and none but he, 
who can make us feel, in certain most 
memorable phases, the fascinating, fan- 
tastic, elusive, incessant mystery of that 
which must forever environ human con- 
sciousness, unseen, unknown, impalpa- 
ble, implacable, undeniable. 
[ 222 ] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

The mood we are thus attempting 
to define is bafflingly elusive; it has no 
precise substance, no organic or articu- 
late form. It is essentially a concept not 
of reason, or even of pervasive human 
emotion, but only of poetry — a subtly 
phantasmal state of spirit, evocable only 
by the poet who has been endowed with 
power to call it from the vasty deep 
where, except for him, it must have 
lurked in secret forever. If it were not 
unique, it could not be itself; for it 
would not be quite his, and whatever 
is not quite his is not his at all. So 
much we may confidently assert. 

If we should permit ourselves, the 
while, either to rest with the assertion, or 
to stray in fancy through conclusion 
after conclusion toward which it may 
have seemed to lead us, we should remain 
or wander mischievously far from the 
truth. That Poe's imagination was soli- 
[ 223 ] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

tary, like so much of the circumstance of 
his life, we need not deny or dispute. 
Clearly, nevertheless, he lived his soli- 
tary life not in some fantastic nowhere, 
but amid the undeniably recorded reali- 
ties of these United States of America 
during the first half of the Nineteenth 
Century. It is equally clear that 
throughout the years when his solitary 
poetic imagination was giving to its 
airy nothings their local habitations and 
their names, countless other poetic 
imaginations, at home and abroad, 
were striving to do likewise, each in its 
own way and fashion. Solitary, apart, 
almost defiant though the aspect of 
Poe may have seemed, isolated though 
we may still find the records of his life 
or the creatures of his imagination, he 
was never anachronistic. Even the 
visual image of his restless presence, 
which we tried to call up a little while 
[ 224 ] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

ago, will prove on scrutiny not only 
individual, but outwardly cast in the 
form and the habit of its own time — 
to the very decade and year of the 
almanac. With his dreams, and with 
the magic fabrics into which he wrought 
them, the case is much the same. Nei- 
ther dreams nor fabrics, any more than 
his bodily presence, could have been 
quite themselves — and still less could 
the dreams and the fabrics have com- 
bined forever in their wondrous poetic 
harmonies — during any other epoch 
than that wherein Poe lived and moved 
and had his being. 

What I mean must soon be evident 
if we stop to seek a general name for 
the kind of poetical mood which Poe 
could always evoke in so specific a form 
and degree. The word is instantly at 
hand, inexact and canting if you will, 
but undeniable. It is the word which 
[ 225 ] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

his contemporaries might carelessly, 
yet not untruly, have applied to his per- 
sonal appearance, alluring to the eye 
if only for the quiet defiance of his tem- 
peramental solitude. It is the word by 
which we might most fitly have char- 
acterised such impulsive curiosity as 
should have impelled us, if we had seen 
him, to inquire who this mysterious- 
looking stranger might be. It is the 
word — misused, teasing, filmily evasive 
— by which we are still apt indefinitely 
to define the general aesthetic temper 
of his time, all over the European and 
American world. We use it concern- 
ing every manner of emotion and 
of conduct, and the countless phases 
of literature or of the other fine 
arts throughout their whole protean 
ranges of expression. You will have 
guessed already, long before I shall 
have come to utter it, the word thus 
[ 226 ] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

hovering in all our minds — the word 
romantic. 

If we should hereupon attempt for- 
mally to define what this familiar word 
means, there would be no hope left us. 
Turn, as widely as you will, to dic- 
tionaries, to encyclopaedias, to volumes, 
and to libraries of volumes. Each may 
throw its ray of light on the matter; 
none will completely illuminate it or 
irradiate. You might as well seek 
words which should comprehend, in 
descriptive finality, the full, delicate, 
sensuous truth of the savour of a fruit 
or of the scent of a flower. Yet, for all 
this, there are aspects of romanticism 
on which we may helpfully dwell; and 
of these the first is an acknowledged 
matter of history. Throughout all 
parts of the world then dominated by 
European tradition, the temper of the 
first half of the Nineteenth Century was 
[ 227 ] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

predominantly romantic. This was no- 
where more evident than in the sponta- 
neous outburst of poetry which, in less 
than twenty years, enriched the roll of 
English poets with the names of Words- 
worth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, By- 
ron, and Scott. Now the way in which 
this period of poetry was lately de- 
scribed in an American announcement 
of teaching may help us to perceive, 
with a little more approach to preci- 
sion, one feature of what romanticism 
everywhere means. Some worthy pro- 
fessor, doubtless chary of indefinite 
terms, chose to describe the romantic 
poets as those of the period when the 
individual spirit revived in English 
literature. Poetic or not, this sound 
instructor of youth was historically 
right. The very essence of romanti- 
cism lies in passionate assertion of lit- 
erary or artistic individuality. Where- 
[ 228 ] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

fore, as we can now begin to feel sure, 
that romantic isolation of Poe's has 
double significance; it not only marks 
him, apart from others, as individual, 
but at the same time it defines him as an 
individual of his own romantic period. 

We shall not go astray, then, if we 
ponder for a little while on this whole 
romantic generation. Before long, we 
may contentfuUy agree that the indi- 
vidualism of the romantic poets re- 
sulted everywhere from their passion- 
ate declaration of independence from 
outworn poetic authority. The precise 
form of poetic authority from which they 
fervently broke free was the pseudo- 
classic tradition of the Eighteenth Cen- 
tury — in matters literary a period of 
formal rhetorical decency, and of a 
cool common-sense which had little 
mercy for the vagaries of uncontrolled 
aesthetic emotion. 

[ 229 ] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

Already we may well feel insecure. 
We are straying, beyond peradven- 
ture, into dangerously elusive general- 
isation, interminably debatable. Yet, 
if our present line of thought is to lead 
us anywhere, we must not hesitate 
to generalise more boldly still. That 
same Eighteenth Century, from which 
romanticism broke free, was not a 
sporadic and intrusive episode in the 
history of European culture; it was 
the culmination of a period at least five 
hundred years long. This period began 
when the reviving critical scholarship 
of the Renaissance brought back to the 
dominant upper consciousness of Eu- 
rope a vivid understanding of the facts 
of classical antiquity; and when, so 
doing, it began to suppress the vigorous 
and splendid body of intervening tra- 
dition and temper to which we have 
consequently given the name of medi- 
[ 230 .] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

seval. In matters literary, at least, the 
spirit which began with the Renais- 
sance persisted until the Revolution of 
the dying Eighteenth Century prepared 
the way for that Nineteenth Century, 
of romantic freedom, wherein Poe lived 
and did his living work. 

Already we can begin to see that 
there was some analogy between the 
Middle Ages, which preceded the Re- 
naissance, and the epoch of romanti- 
cism which ensued after the Eighteenth 
Century. Both periods, at least, were 
free — each in its own way — from the 
intellectual control of such formal clas- 
sicism or pseudo-classicism as inter- 
vened. A little closer scrutiny of the 
Middle Ages may therefore help us to 
appreciate what Nineteenth Century 
romanticism meant. Throughout that 
whole mediaeval period, we may soon 
agree, the intellect of Europe was 
[ 231 ] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

authoritatively forbidden to exert itself 
beyond narrowly fixed and rigid lim- 
its. European emotion, meanwhile, was 
permitted vagrant and luxuriant free- 
dom of range and of expression. It 
might wander wherever it would. 

In contrast with this period, we can 
now begin to see, the Renaissance may 
be conceived as an intellectual declara- 
tion of independence; and through a 
full five hundred years, the intellect of 
Europe was increasingly free. Its very 
freedom made it, in turn, tyrannical. 
At least in the matters of temper and 
of fashion, it repressed, controlled, 
or ignored the ranges of emotion 
which had flourished during its sub- 
jection. In literature its tyranny ex- 
tended far and wide. Though for a 
while thought was permitted to range 
more and more unfettered, emotion 
was at best sentimentalised. So, when 
[ 232 ] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

the centuries of tyranny were past, 
poetry, if it were ever to regain full 
freedom of emotional existence, if it 
were ever to enjoy again the fine frenzy 
of creation, needed more than inde- 
pendence. To revive the spirit which 
should vitally reanimate its enfranchise- 
ment it needed to drink again from the 
fountains for which it had thirsted for 
hundreds of years; it must revert to 
something like the unfettered emotional 
freedom of the Middle Ages. 

To put the case a little more dis- 
tinctly, the romanticism of the Nine- 
teenth Century could be its true self 
only when to the intellectual maturity 
developed by five hundred years of clas- 
sical culture it could add full and eager 
sympathy with the tremendous emotions 
of the Middle Ages, inevitably ancestral 
to all modernity. So the instinct was 
profoundly vital which directed the en- 
[ 233 ] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

thusiasm of poets to mediaeval themes 
and traditions, even though these were 
imperfectly understood. The inspira- 
tion derived from them came not so 
much from any detail of their actual his- 
torical circumstances as from their in- 
stant, obvious remoteness from the com- 
mon-sense facts of daily experience — 
matters judiciously to be handled only 
by the colourless activity of intellect. It 
was remoteness from actuality, above 
all else, which made romantic your 
romantic ruins and romantic villains, 
your romantic heroines, your romantic 
passions, and your romantic aspira- 
tions. Yet even your most romantic 
poet must give the airy nothings of his 
imagination a local habitation and a 
name. Unreal and fantastic though 
they might be, they must possess at 
least some semblance of reality; and 
this semblance, whether bodily or spir- 
[ 234 ] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

itual, normally assumed a mediaeval 
guise. 

Throughout Europe such semblance 
could always be guided, controlled, 
and regulated by the pervasive presence 
everywhere of relics, material or tradi- 
tional, of the mediaeval times thus at 
length welcomed back to the light. 
So far as the full romantic literature of 
Europe deals with mediaeval matters, 
accordingly, or so far as intentionally 
or instinctively it reverts to mediaeval 
temper, it has a kind of solidity hardly 
to be found in the poetic utterance of 
its contemporary America. For, at the 
beginning of the Nineteenth Century, 
America was not only consciously fur- 
ther than Europe from all the common 
roots of our ancestral humanity; it 
possessed hardly a line of what is now 
accepted as our national literature. As 
patriots and as men of their time, the 
[ 235 ] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

poets of America were called on to 
add their part to romantic expression. 
To give their expression semblance of 
reality they had no mediaeval relics to 
guide them, nor enduring local tradi- 
tions, thick and strong about them. 
They were compelled to rely on sheer 
force of creative imagination. Preten- 
tious as that phrase may sound, it is 
animated by a spirit of humility. Its 
purpose is in no wise to claim supe- 
riority for the romantic literary achieve- 
ment of our country. It is rather, by 
stating the magnitude of our national 
task, to explain our comparative lack of 
robust solidity, and to indicate why the 
peculiar note of our country must in- 
evitably have been a note of our singu- 
lar, though not necessarily of powerful, 
creative purity. 

Now just such creative purity is evi- 
dently characteristic of Poe. It may 
[ 236 ] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

sometimes have seemed that among 
our eminent men of letters he is the 
least obviously American. A little 
while ago, indeed, when I again turned 
through all the pages of his collected 
works, I was freshly surprised to find 
how little explicit trace they bore of the 
precise environment where they were 
written. Throughout all their length, 
it seemed, there was not a single com- 
plete page on which a stranger might 
rest proof that it had come to the light 
in this country. The first example 
which occurs to me — it happens to be 
also the most generally familiar — will 
show you what I have in mind: the 
mysterious chamber where the Raven 
forces uncanny entrance is not Ameri- 
can. The image of it originated, per- 
haps, in a room still pointed out. Yet, 
so far as the atmosphere of it is con- 
cerned, that room might have been 
[ 237 ] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

anywhere ; or rather, as it lives far and 
wide, it is surely nowhere. Yet, all the 
while, it has a strange semblance of 
reality. What is true here proves true 
throughout. The Paris of Poe's detec- 
tive stories is no real Paris; the House 
of Usher never stood, or fell, on any 
earthly continent; Poe's Maelstrom 
whirls as fantastic as the balloon or the 
moon of Hans Pfaal. One might go on 
unceasingly, recalling at random im- 
pression after impression, vivid as the 
most vivid of dreams, and always as 
impalpable. There is nowhere else 
romantic fantasy so securely remote 
from all constraining taint of literal 
reality ; there is none anywhere more 
unconditioned in its creative freedom. 

Thus, paradoxical though the thought 

may at first seem*, Poe tacitly, but 

clearly and triumphantly, asserts his 

nationality. No other romanticism of 

[ 238 ] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

the Nineteenth Century was ever so 
serenely free from limitation of material 
condition and tradition; none, there- 
fore, was so indisputably what the 
native romanticism of America must 
inevitably have been. Call his work 
significant, if you like, or call it un- 
meaning; decide that it is true or false, 
as you will, in ethical or artistic pur- 
pose. Nothing can alter its wondrous 
independence of all but deliberately 
accepted artistic limitations. In this 
supreme artistic purity lies not only the 
chief secret of its wide appeal, but at 
the same time the subtle trait which 
marks it as the product of its own time, 
and of its own time nowhere else than 
here in America, our common country. 
American though Pope's utterance 
be, the while, it stays elusive. When 
one tries to group it with any other 
utterance of his time, one feels again 
[ 239 ] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

and afresh the impression of its tem- 
peramental solitude. This solitude is 
far from prophetic or austere; it is as 
remote as possible from that of a voice 
crying in the wilderness. Nor indeed 
was America, in Poe's time, any longer 
a wilderness wherein a poet should seem 
a stranger. Even though when the 
Nineteenth Century began there was 
hardly such a thing as literature in 
America, the years of Poe's life brought 
us rather copiousness than dearth of 
national expression. As a New Eng- 
lander, for example, I may perhaps be 
pardoned for reminding you that in the 
year 1830 Boston could not have shown 
you a single recognized volume to dem- 
onstrate that it was ever to be a centre 
of purely literary importance. Twenty 
years later, when Poe died, the region 
of Boston had already produced, in pure 
literature, the fully developed charac- 
[ ^40 ] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

ters, though not yet the complete and 
rounded work, of Emerson, and Long- 
fellow, and Lowell, and Holmes, and 
Whittier, and Hawthorne. 

For the moment, I call this group to 
mind only that we may more clearly per- 
ceive the peculiar individuality of Poe. 
In many aspects, each of the New Eng- 
land group was individual, enough and 
to spare ; nobody who ever knew them 
could long confuse one with another. 
Yet individual though they were, none 
of them ever seems quite solitary or 
isolated. You rarely think of any 
among them as standing apart from 
the rest, nor yet from the historical, the 
social, the religious or the philosophic 
conditions which brought them all to 
the point of poetic utterance. Now Poe 
was in every sense their contemporary; 
yet the moment you gladly yield your- 
self to the contagion of his poetic sym- 
[ 241 ] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

pathy, you find yourself alone with him 
— aesthetically solitary. You might 
fancy yourself for the while fantasti- 
cally disembodied — a waking wanderer 
in some region of unalloyed dreams. 
American though he be, beyond any 
question, and a man of his time as well, 
he proves, beyond all other Americans 
throughout the growingly illustrious roll 
of our national letters, immune from 
imprisonment within any classifying 
formula which should surely include any 
other than his own haunting and fas- 
cinating self. 

This isolation might at first seem a 
token of weakness. Enchanting as the 
fascination of Poe must forever be — 
even to those who strive to resist it and 
give us dozens of wise pages to prove 
him undeserving of such attention — 
the most ardent of his admirers can 
hardly maintain his work to be domi- 
[ 242 ] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

nant or commanding. Except for the 
pleasure it gives you, it leaves you little 
moved; it does not meddle with your 
philosophy, or modify your rules of 
conduct. Its power lies altogether in 
the strange excellence of its peculiar 
beauty; and even though the most 
ethical poet of his contemporary New 
England has immortally assured us that 
beauty is its own excuse for being, we 
can hardly forget that Emerson's apho- 
rism sprang from contemplation of a 
wild flower, in the exquisite perfection 
of ephemeral fragility. A slight thing 
some might thus come to fancy the 
isolated work of Poe — the poet of Nine- 
teenth Century America whose spirit 
hovered most persistently remote from 
actuality. 

If such mood should threaten to 
possess us, even for a little while, the 
concourse here gathered together should 
[ 243 ] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

surely set us free. That spirit which 
hovered aloof sixty and seventy years 
ago is hovering still. It shall hover, we 
can now confidently assert, through 
centuries unending. The solitude of 
weakness, or of fragility, is no such 
solitude as this; weak and fragile soli- 
tude vanishes with its earthly self, leav- 
ing no void behind. Solitude which 
persists as Poe's is persisting proves it- 
self by the very tenacity of its persist- 
ence to be the solitude of unflagging and 
independent strength. Such strength 
as this is sure token of poetic greatness. 
We may grow more confident than 
ever. We may unhesitatingly assert 
Poe not only American, but great. 

So we come to one further ques- 
tion, nearer to us, as fellow-country- 
men, than those on which we have 
touched before. It is the question of 
just where the enduring work of this 
[ 244 ] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

great American poet should be placed 
in the temperamental history of our 
country — of just what phase it may be 
held to express of the national spirit of 
America. 

That national spirit — the spirit which 
animates and inspires the life of our 
native land — ^has had a solemn and a 
tragic history. From the very begin- 
ning of our national growth, historic 
circumstance at once prevented any 
spiritual centralisation of our national 
life, and encouraged in diverse regions, 
equally essential to the completeness 
of our national existence, separate 
spiritual centres, each true to itself and 
for that very reason defiant of others. 
So far as the separate phases of our na- 
tional spirit have ever been able to meet 
one another open-hearted, they have 
marvelled to know the true depth of 
their communion. Open-hearted meet- 
[ 245 ] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

ing, however, has rarely been possible ; 
and throughout the Nineteenth Century 
— the century in which Poe lived and 
wrought — it was hardjy possible at all. 
Americans were brethren, as they were 
brethren before, as they are brethren 
now, as they shall stay brethren, God 
willing, through centuries to come. For 
the while, however, their brotherhood 
was sadly turbulent. They believed 
that they spoke a common language. 
The accents of it sounded familiar 
to the ears of all. Yet the meanings 
which those accents were bidden to 
carry seemed writhed into distortion 
on their way to the very ears which 
were straining to catch them. It was 
an epoch, we must sadly grant, of a 
Babel of the spirit. 

So, throughout Poe's time, there was 
hardly one among the many whom the 
time held greater than he to whose voice 
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EDGAR ALLAN POE 

the united spirit of our country could 
ever unhesitatingly and harmoniously 
respond. What I h«,ve in mind may 
well have occurred to you, of Virginia, 
when a little while ago I named the six 
chief literary worthies of New England 
in the Nineteenth Century. They were 
contemporaries of Poe. They were 
honest men and faithful poets. They 
never hesitated to utter, with all their 
hearts, what they devotedly believed to 
be the truth. Every one of them, too, 
was immemorially American. Not one 
of them cherished any ancestral tradi- 
tion but was native to this country, 
since the far-off days of King Charles 
the First. In every one of them, accord- 
ingly, any American — North or South, 
East or West — must surely find utter- 
ances heroically true to the idealism 
ancestrally and peculiarly our own. 
Yet it would be mischievous folly to 
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EDGAR ALLAN POE 

pretend that such utterances, speaking 
for us all, can ever tell the whole story 
of the New England poets. They were 
not only Americans, as we all are ; they 
were Americans of Nineteenth Century 
New England. As such they could not 
have been the honest men they were if 
they had failed to concern themselves 
passionately with the irrepressible dis- 
putes and conflicts of their tragic times. 
They could not so concern themselves 
without utterance after utterance fatally 
sure to provoke passionate response, or 
passionate revulsion in fellow-country- 
men of traditions other than their own. 
Even this sad truth hardly includes 
the limitation of their localism. Turn 
to their quieter passages, descriptive or 
gently anecdotic. Strong, simple, sin- 
cere, admirable though these be, they are 
excellent, we must freely grant, chiefly 
because they could have been made no- 
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EDGAR ALLAN POE 

where else than just where they were. 
In New England, for example, there 
was never a native human being who 
could fail to recognise that "Snow 
Bound " was a genuine utterance 
straight from the stout heart of his own 
people ; nor yet one, I believe, who, smile 
though he might at his own sentimental- 
ity, could resist the appeal of the "Vil- 
lage Blacksmith." We may well doubt, 
however, whether any Southern reader, 
in those old times, could have helped 
feeling that these verses — as surely as 
those of Burns, let us say, or of Words- 
worth — came from other regions than 
those familiar to his daily life. 

The literature of New England, in 
brief, American though we may all 
gladly assert it in its nobler phases, is, 
first of all, not American or national, 
but local. What is thus true of New 
England is generally true, I believe, of 
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EDGAR ALLAN POE 

literary expression throughout America. 
Turn, if you will, to the two memorable 
writers of New York during the first 
quarter of the Nineteenth Century — 
Washington Irving and James Feni- 
more Cooper. They were good men, 
and honest men of letters, and admira- 
ble story-tellers. Neither of them, how- 
ever, wasted any love on his neighbours 
a little to the eastward ; both hated the 
unwinsome surface of decadent Puri- 
tanism; and neither understood the 
mystic fervour of the Puritan spirit. 
So, even to this day, a sensitive reader 
in New England will now and again 
discover, in Irving or in Cooper, pas- 
sages or turns of phrase which shall still 
set his blood faintly tingling with re- 
sentment. Whatever the positive merit, 
whatever the sturdy honesty of most 
American expression in the Nineteenth 
Century, it lacked conciliatory breadth 
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EDGAR ALLAN POE 

of feeling. Its intensity of localism 
marks it, whatever the peacefulness of 
its outward guise, as the utterance of a 
fatally discordant time. 

Now it is from this same discordant 
time that the works of Poe have come 
down to us; and no work could have 
been much less inspired by the local 
traditions and temper of New Eng- 
land. To his vagrant and solitary 
spirit, indeed, those traditions must 
have been abhorrent. New England 
people, too, would probably have liked 
him as little as he liked them. You 
might well expect that even now, when 
the younger generations of New Eng- 
land turn to his tales or his poems, 
sparks of resentment might begin to 
rekindle. In one sense, perhaps, they 
may seem to; for Poe's individuality is 
too intense for universal appeal. You 
will find readers in New England just 
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EDGAR ALLAN POE 

as you will find readers elsewhere, who 
stay deaf to the haunting music of 
his verse and blind to the wreathing 
films of his unearthly fantasy. Such 
lack of sympathy, however, you will 
never find to be a matter of ancestral 
tradition or of local prejudice or of 
any sectional limitation; it will prove 
wholly and unconditionally to be a 
matter only of individual tempera- 
ment. Among the enduring writers 
of Nineteenth Century America, Poe 
stands unique. 

Inevitably of his country and of his 
time, he eludes all limitation of more 
narrow scope or circumstance. Of all, 
I believe, he is the only one to whom, 
in his own day, all America might con- 
fidently have turned, as all America 
may confidently turn still, and forever, 
with certainty of finding no line, no 
word, no quiver of thought or of feeling 
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EDGAR ALLAN POE 

which should arouse or revive the con- 
sciousness or the memory of our tragic 
national discords, now happily for all 
alike heroic matters of the past. The 
more we dwell on the enduring work 
of this great American poet, the more 
clearly this virtue of it must shine be- 
fore us all. In the temperamental his- 
tory of our country, it is he, and he 
alone, as yet, who is not local but surely, 
enduringly national. 

As I thus grow to reverence in him 
a wondrous harbinger of American 
spiritual reunion, I find hovering in 
my fancy some lines of his which, once 
heard, can never be quite forgotten. 
To him, I believe, they must have 
seemed only a thing of beauty. He 
would have been impatient of the sug- 
gestion that any one should ever read 
into them the prose of deeper signifi- 
cance. It was song, and only song, 

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EDGAR ALLAN POE 

which possessed him when he wrote 
the words : 

If I could dwell 
Where Israfel 

Hath dwelt, and he where I, 
He might not sing so wildly well 

A mortal melody. 
While a bolder note than this might swell 

From my lyre within the sky. 

Is it too much to fancy, nevertheless, 
that to-day we can hear that bolder 
note swelling about us as we meet here 
in communion ? None could be purer, 
none more sweet; and, beyond the 
shadow of a doubt, none could more 
serenely help to resolve the discords of 
his fellow-countrymen into their final 
harmony. 



[ 254 ] 



VI 
DE PRiESIDE MAGNIFICO 

A Poem delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa 

Society of Harvard College, July 1, 1909. 

First printed in the "Harvard Graduates' Magazine'* 

for September, 1909. 



VI 
DE PRESIDE MAGNIFICO 

Once first alone, long first amid the peers 

Who cluster thickening through the swift- winged years, 

Our college, rich with memories all our own. 

Must ever stay for us the first alone. 

For, while the sunlight gleams about us still. 

Even though the shadows hover, as they will, 

Nearer and nearer, all our bright array 

Of yesterdays forever yesterday 

Can never fade, so radiant must be 

The magic of their diuturnity 

One seems like yesterday indeed, although 
They tell us it was forty years ago 
When we awoke to see the June sun shine 
On Class Day for the Class of Sixty-nine. 
Seniors, resplendent in their white cravats, 
Their black dress-clothes, their glossy beaver hats. 
Heard Francis Peabody, a godly youth. 
Proclaim in church the sanctity of truth; 
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DE PRiESIDE MAGNIFICO 

While Bowditch, fair-moustached, and slight of girth, 

As Marshal was the dearest thing on earth — 

This was the whispered comment of a girl. 

With waterfall and pretty, dangling curl. 

And Fiske, suppressing evident alarms, 

Heard wavering voices chant his Ode's endearing charms. 

To youngsters then all Harvard seemed a dream 
Of dignity and strawberries and cream. 
To elder folks, who knows ? They bear the stars 
Who bore the burden then, and little mars 
Their distant purity. One to survive — 
A Sophomore in Seventeen Ninety-five — 
Had watched our college wax and wane until 
The blameless days of guileless Thomas Hill; 
Willard and Webber were of those he knew. 
And Kirkland hobbled still, almost in view 
Of half-closed eyes; and Quincy, marble now. 
Seemed breathing, with his tall, Olympian brow; 
Like Everett, who had given to every place 
Honour could lavish new, peculiar grace. 
And when a graduate rose to make remarks. 
Likely as not, he would touch on Jared Sparks, 
Or mention, as if still enthralled thereby, 
That shrewd old Walker's wisely twinkling eye; 
And Felton's wit had hardly ceased to speak 
The bright humanity of human Greek 
I 258 ] 



DE PRiESIDE MAGNIFICO 

These were the presidents they knew, and there 
Before them Parson Turell's empty chair 
Awaited, as it need no more await, 
One who should sit therein securely great. 

Securely great we know him now, and they 
Who, doubtful then, bear on the stars to-day 
Shining before us, came to know him so 
Before they went the way we all must go. 
For he has conquered doubt, perplexity. 
Misunderstanding; he has lived to see 
Ten college generations, in acclaim 
Harmonious, greet the honour of his name. 
Not all at once: he heard his call to strife 
Just mid- way in the journey of our life — 
An age held boyish nowadays — ^and he 
Kept his own counsel perseveringly. 
His elders brought him wisdom's treasured lore; 
His mates — if mates there were — were even more 
Prone to advise, with inexperience 
Masked in the sturdy guise of common-sense; 
And students, thronging hither year by year. 
Clamored to keep what always had been here. 
He listened patiently to all, to all 
Gave what he deemed their due, and therewithal 
Went his own way serene. Election 
He held, almost with Calvin, was the one 
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DE PRESIDE MAGNIFICO 

Way to salvation; and he dared expect 
Boys to be god-like, and like him to elect. 
Yet what he chose he chose the Lord knew why — 
At least, so others thought — till by and by 
In faculties each learned elder head 
Would wag dismayed at almost all he said, 
While younger faces lengthened, quite aghast 
To find the future tangled with the past. 
At one with none, from none dissevered quite. 
He strove to lead them all toward the light, 
And thus to all seemed vagrantly astray. 
For each one held his own the better way. 
So, through his rounded course of forty years 
Unwon by sympathy, unswerved by jeers. 
Patient with all, surrendering to none, 
He has done the work the whole world finds well done. 
No need to tell the story. Far and wide. 
From where our coasts repel the Atlantic tide 
To where the unbroken continental shore 
Re-echoes the Pacific's vasty roar, 
They tell it for us. Pilgrims from afar — 
From wakening Japan, the morning star 
Of Asia, from imperious Cathay, 
From Europe, our great mother — make their way 
Hither to learn; and the soft Indian breeze 
Diffuses Harvard law to yellow Siamese. 
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DE PRESIDE MAGNIFICO 

Great beyond cavil, work so testified ; 
But there is something to be said beside : 
He seemed — one never knew — so fond of change 
That if you let imagination range 
In untried regions of experiment 
You had his ear; but if you paused content 
To better, if you could, your daily task 
He gave you little — so you ceased to ask. 
He never showed resentment; rather, he 
Remained incarnate magnanimity; 
But, even so, took languid interest 
In that poor thing — ^yet dear to you — your best. 
He loved statistics — never seemed to care, 
So we got Freshmen, who the Freshmen were; 
Appeared convinced no one could be a fool 
Who taught, or meant to teach, in public school; 
Doubted if bishops could have common-sense; 
Cheerily dallied with obscure pretence; 
And, when the mood was on him, could forget 
What makes a doctor different from a vet. 
Great though his work were, noble though his aim. 
Constant his purpose, merited his fame. 
Stately his presence, he was not quite free 
From lingering foibles of humanity. 

Well, who would have him so ? He, least of all, 
Careless of self. Enthusiastical 
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DE PRiESIDE MAGNIFICO 

For what he held the truth, he has persevered 
Saintly in fervid faith, when others feared, 
Fully assured, when others doubted still, 
That human good surpasses human ill. 
So, would you know his mission, and the need 
He has fulfilled, recall that grisly creed 
The reverent Pilgrim Fathers trembling bore 
From sinful Europe to our desert shore. 
Calvin had taught them in their earlier home. 
As grim Augustine taught imperial Rome, 
How God disdained, with justly deathless wrath. 
The seed of Adam scattered by the path 
Where they must totter on and still revere 
His majesty in consecrated fear. 
Their lives were simple, and their manners stern; 
They tried to do God's will; their sons, in turn; 
Their children's children, too — unwitting race 
Of chosen vessels of abounding grace. 
Then, when men's wondering eyes began to see 
In man the image of divinity. 
And so their primal faith could almost seem 
Phantasmagoric, like an evil dream. 
Unflinching Edwards, heedless of the time. 
Rose with his logic, terribly sublime, 
Revived the might of Calvin's drooping God, 
And kept them in the ways their fathers trod. 
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DE PRiESIDE MAGNIFICO 

Supreme awhile, ere long his fiery glow 
Proved that of Calvin's sunset here below; 
For when our nation breathed its morning air. 
Thrilled with the glories gleaming everywhere, 
Ethereal Channing, staid New England saint. 
Born to an age still pure of foreign taint. 
Surveyed mankind with the benignant eye 
Of Unitarian divinity. 

His was the voice of promise; his white flame 
Made our new world irradiate — the same 
In purity, in buoyant hope at last 
Freed from the sombre phantoms of the past. 
So, for a while, the future seemed secure. 
Dejection folly, aspiration sure. 

But changeless change has brought us gloomier times — 
Old-world corruption, world-old human crimes. 
Greed, lust and villainy — a world wherein 
Man crawls again, laden with mortal sin. 
Was Channing, then, only a dreamer, too. 
Of lovelier dreams than elder dreamers knew ? 
Some faint hearts deem so ; but one clarion voice 
Through forty years has bid us all "Rejoice! 
What though this world look worse than Channing taught ? 
Pierce through its surface with the darts of thought, 
And virtue rooted there shall prove you still 
How human good surpasses human ill!" 
[ 263 ] 



DE PRESIDE MAGNIFICO 

As Edwards, holding Channing's precepts true, 
Preached them to practice, made them live anew. 
So Eliot now asserts our happier state, 
Edwards of Channing — each securely great. 

In all his strength he lays his burden down, 
Serene in faith that future years shall crown 
His labours to their end. Another face 
Shall henceforth fill his long-accustomed place; 
And Lowell's buoyant coming lays all fears 
For Harvard in her new, increasing years. 
Sprung from a steadfast race whose virtues shine 
Clear on our starry rolls, the sixth in line 
Father to son, his words and deed^ foretell 
Bold words to come and deeds done bravely well. 
So heralded, wherever he has shown 
His presence, there already he is known 
Clear-eyed, clear-voiced, pure-hearted — augury 
That as he is, so he shall always be 
Sure of our hearts. He cannot rise above 
The sweet reality of human love. 



[ 264 ] 



OCT 13 1909 



